Judge allows Trump administration to end deportation protections for thousands of Ethiopians | CNN Politics
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.
US District Court Judge Brian E. Murphy denied a request from African Communities Together, an organization which advocates for African immigrants in the US, to postpone the termination of the relief known as Temporary Protected Status 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.
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 deportations.
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 that conflict has killed hundreds of thousands of people.
The Biden administration in 2022 granted certain citizens of Ethiopia who recently arrived to 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 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, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, 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 because, they contended, the power actually rested with the attorney general.
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.