A federal judge in Boston has cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip deportation protections from more than 232 South Sudanese nationals, rejecting a last-ditch legal argument that immigrant-rights advocates hoped would keep Temporary Protected Status alive. U.S. District Judge Patti Saris ruled Friday that the Department of Homeland Security does have the authority to end TPS for South Sudan, dealing a blow to a novel statutory theory that had emerged only weeks earlier as one of the last remaining paths to block the termination.
According to Reuters, Saris had previously blocked the termination of protections for South Sudanese nationals back in February, but her latest ruling reverses course. The advocacy group African Communities Together and South Sudanese nationals had urged Saris to block the termination on new grounds, arguing that DHS never actually had the legal authority to end TPS in the first place because Congress had assigned that power to the Attorney General, not DHS, when the program was created in 1990.
Saris didn't buy it. She found that Congress had transferred TPS authority from the Attorney General to DHS, and she noted the argument undercut itself: if DHS truly lacked the power to terminate TPS for South Sudan, it also would not have had the power to extend those protections in the first place. Per Reuters, Saris said the advocates' position rested on a self-contradictory, self-defeating foundation, adding that South Sudan's original TPS designation would itself be invalid if the termination were found invalid.
A Supreme Court Ruling Changed the Legal Landscape
The statutory argument surfaced only after the U.S. Supreme Court's June 25 decision in Mullin v. Doe, a 6-3 ruling authored by Justice Samuel Alito that found 8 U.S.C. § 1254a(b)(5)(A) bars federal courts from reviewing non-constitutional challenges to DHS decisions on TPS terminations and extensions, according to background compiled by Wikipedia. Justice Elena Kagan dissented. With that avenue closed, advocacy groups pivoted to the statutory-authority theory across several pending TPS cases nationwide, as detailed by Inkl.
The First Circuit Court of Appeals had already signaled where things were headed. On July 29, the appellate court summarily reversed lower court administrative stays that had paused South Sudan's TPS termination and remanded the case back to Saris, according to Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. The appellate panel noted that non-constitutional claims formed the sole basis of the earlier stay — the exact category of claim the Supreme Court had just ruled off-limits to judicial review.
DHS Cited Improved Conditions, Rights Groups Disagree
DHS moved to terminate TPS for South Sudan in November 2025, saying in its official termination notice that the country no longer met the conditions required for the designation and citing executive orders that prioritize immigration enforcement and limit TPS to strict statutory criteria, per the seed reporting. South Sudan had held TPS since 2011 due to armed conflict, and the program is meant to cover people whose home countries face natural disasters, armed conflicts, or other extraordinary events.
That assessment stands in tension with independent human rights reporting. A July 2026 submission from Human Rights Watch to the UN Human Rights Council detailed a severe deterioration of security and human rights in South Sudan, including widespread armed conflict, unlawful killings, sexual violence, and mass civilian displacement. As of July, the U.S. State Department still maintained its highest Level 4 Do Not Travel warning for the country, citing severe risks of violent crime, kidnapping, and ongoing armed conflict, according to monitoring by Third Country Deportation Watch.
DHS Presses Other Judges to Follow Suit
James Percival, DHS general counsel, urged other judges to follow Saris's lead and lift orders preventing the agency from ending protections for people from other countries, arguing that administrative stays deny the American people what they voted for. Plaintiffs' spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment, the seed reporting noted.
The ruling fits into a broader pattern. The Supreme Court has already allowed the administration to end similar protections for people from Haiti and Syria, and between 2025 and 2026 the Trump administration moved to end TPS designations for more than a dozen countries, including Venezuela, Haiti, Syria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Myanmar, according to the International Rescue Committee. South Sudan's roughly 210 approved TPS holders represent one of the smallest protected populations nationwide, according to National Immigration Forum data, dwarfed by Venezuela and Haiti's combined total of more than 900,000 recipients as of early 2025.
What Happens Next for Affected Workers
The DHS termination action would end protections for more than 232 South Sudanese nationals and affect at least 73 people with pending applications. In the meantime, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued guidance on Thursday granting a brief extension of South Sudan TPS holders' work permits through Monday, buying a few more days while the legal fallout settles, according to Fragomen.
The legal fight over authority traces back to the program's origins. Congress created TPS under the Immigration Act of 1990 and initially gave termination and extension authority to the Attorney General; the Homeland Security Act of 2002, passed after the September 11 attacks, reorganized immigration agencies and shifted most immigration-related functions to the newly created DHS, per the Immigrant Legal Resource Center's history of the statute. Saris, who was appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, concluded that transfer of authority was legally sound — closing off what advocates had hoped would be a final lifeline for South Sudanese TPS holders.
Hoodline has tracked the last-minute TPS scramble affecting caregivers and workers nationwide as the Supreme Court's June ruling reshaped what federal courts can and cannot do to slow these terminations, a pattern now playing out for South Sudanese nationals in Boston's federal court.
