A federal judge has approved the Trump administration’s effort to end temporary protected status (TPS) for South Sudanese nationals in the United States, according to a ruling from US district judge Patti Saris of the district of Massachusetts on Friday. Saris rejected an attempt by immigrant rights organizations to maintain TPS protections for South Sudanese nationals living in the US.

Supreme Court Precedent

This decision follows a 6-3 Supreme Court ruling in June that allowed the Trump administration to strip TPS from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned lower court rulings in New York and Washington DC, which had blocked the administration from ending TPS for more than 350,000 Haitians and about 6,100 Syrians.

TPS Designation Explained

Temporary protected status allows eligible people from countries facing crises such as civil war and environmental disasters to remain in the US temporarily, protects them from deportation, and allows them to work legally. Saris’s 15-page ruling noted that the plaintiffs’ arguments were self-contradictory. She explained that if the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lacked the authority to terminate South Sudan’s TPS designation, it would also have lacked the authority to issue the designation initially.

“South Sudan’s original TPS designation would thus be invalid by the same token as its termination,” Saris wrote in her ruling.

In response to the ruling, James Percival, a DHS general counsel, said on X: “Every other TPS judge must do the same!, and every day these ‘administrative stays’ are in effect is a day the American people are denied what they voted for.”

Immigrant Advocacy Response

The Guardian has contacted African Communities Together for comment; Meanwhile, the immigrant advocacy organization Global Refuge condemned the ruling in a statement to the Guardian on Friday. The CEO, Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, said: “The reality of the situation is that South Sudan is on the brink of a return to an all-out-civil war. Roughly two-thirds of the population, some 10 million people, now depend on humanitarian aid to survive.”

Vignarajah added: “With only several hundred South Sudanese holding TPS in the US right now, this isn’t a policy forced by scale or strain on our system. To the contrary, this is the administration’s deliberate choice to send a small group of vulnerable individuals and families back into a country where civilians are bearing the brunt of intensifying violence and displacement.”

The Trump administration’s effort to strip TPS protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants comes despite the US government’s own highest-level travel warnings for Americans to several countries affected, including South Sudan, Haiti, and Syria.

In the case of South Sudan, the country has been ravaged by years of civil war and political instability that have displaced millions, as Since gaining independence in 2011, more than 400,000 people have been killed in conflict, with fighting and ethnic violence continuing to claim civilian lives.

The DHS moved in November to terminate TPS for South Sudan, saying the country no longer met the conditions for the designation, which was first issued in 2011. The department’s action would have led to the end of protections for more than 232 South Sudanese and at least 73 South Sudanese with pending applications. An earlier order by Saris had blocked that from happening.

After the Supreme Court’s ruling, lawyers for a group of South Sudanese nationals and the non-profit African Communities Together urged Saris to once again block the end of TPS on new grounds that the justices had not addressed. That included an argument that the DHS lacked authority to terminate TPS because the statute that created the TPS program in 1990 referred only to the attorney general as the official who had authority to extend and terminate the deportation protections.

The DHS was established later, in 2002, after the September 11 attacks; most of the justice department’s immigration-related functions were transferred to it at that time. Saris, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, concluded Congress had likewise transferred authority over TPS to the DHS.

Since 2001, TPS holders have paid $7.8 billion annually in taxes and contributed $262 billion to the US economy, according to the advocacy organization Fwd.us — many TPS holders are employed in critical industries already facing worker shortages across the country, including construction, hospitality, and healthcare.

Losing TPS can leave immigrants without legal status vulnerable to arrest, detention, and deportation, even with pending asylum or green card applications, and some may face immigration court proceedings with limited options to stay in the US. Those ordered removed could be deported and barred from returning for years.