A federal judge on Tuesday cleared the way for the Trump administration to end deportation protections for about 5,000 Ethiopians who had been living in the United States under a form of humanitarian relief known as Temporary Protected Status.
US District Court Judge Brian E. Murphy denied a request from African Communities Together, an organization that advocates for African immigrants in the US, to postpone the termination of the relief while the group’s legal challenge plays out.
Tuesday’s ruling is the latest of several court rulings that will strip protections for more than a million people who until recently had been allowed to legally live and work in the US.
What Is TPS?
TPS provides people fleeing war, natural disasters, or humanitarian crises with temporary permission to live and work in the US without fear of being deported. The Trump administration maintains that those permissions are temporary and not a permanent solution, criticizing previous administrations for repeatedly extending them.
The Supreme Court in a ruling earlier this summer allowed the administration to end TPS protections for immigrants from Syria and Haiti, potentially leaving hundreds of thousands of people eligible for deportation.
The Ethiopia Conflict
Beginning in late 2020, armed conflict broke out in Ethiopia’s Tigray state and later spread to other regions in the country. The African Union has estimated that the conflict has killed hundreds of thousands of people.
The Biden administration in 2022 granted certain citizens of Ethiopia who recently arrived in the US an 18-month temporary protection from deportation. Those protections were again extended in 2024 by then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas because of the ongoing conflict.
The Legal Battle
The Department of Homeland Security sought to end TPS protections for Ethiopians by this February, but that move was blocked by Murphy before it could take effect. In his ruling on Tuesday, Murphy rejected new claims pushed by attorneys for the Ethiopians that DHS unlawfully moved to terminate the protections.
The lawyers had claimed that the termination ran afoul of the due process rights afforded to their clients by the US Constitution and that then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem lacked authority in the first place to revoke the TPS designation for Ethiopia.
The Broader Trend
In recent weeks, several other courts have similarly cleared the way for the administration to undo the protections for immigrants from Haiti, South Sudan, and Somalia. The pattern reflects a coordinated effort by the Trump administration to end temporary protections for migrants from multiple countries.
The Bottom Line
A federal judge has cleared the way for the Trump administration to end deportation protections for about 5,000 Ethiopians who had been living in the US under Temporary Protected Status. The ruling is the latest in a series of court decisions that will strip protections for more than a million people from various countries. The Ethiopians were granted TPS due to the ongoing conflict in their home country, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people.
