Activist district judges have spent months trying to run out the clock on Donald Trump’s immigration agenda.
Two of them just got overruled by a panel of their own liberal colleagues.
And the ruling out of a court stacked with Biden appointees handed Trump a win that nobody on the Left saw coming.
When “Temporary” Finally Means Something
Donald Trump scored two immigration victories as the First Circuit reversed orders blocking Temporary Protected Status termination for South Sudan and Ethiopia migrants.
Temporary Protected Status — TPS — is a program Congress created in 1990 to give short-term relief to foreign nationals whose home countries face dangerous conditions. Congress designed TPS to afford temporary relief, though TPS designations have a way of becoming anything but temporary once the legal machinery gets involved.
The judgments from the First Circuit Court of Appeals came after US District Judges Brian Murphy and Patti Saris issued back-to-back orders temporarily blocking the Trump administration’s termination of TPS for Ethiopia and South Sudan, respectively.
The rulings drew sharp criticism from legal experts and Trump administration officials, who called the judges “rogue” and argued their decisions defied the Supreme Court.
And that is exactly what made the First Circuit’s reversal so striking. The three-judge First Circuit panel consisted of Judges Julie Rikelman and Seth Aframe, both appointed by President Joe Biden, and Judge Joshua Dunlap, who was appointed by President Donald Trump. Two Biden judges sided with Trump. The Left has no one to blame but the Supreme Court — and the law.
The Supreme Court Already Settled This
On June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress statutorily barred judicial review of all non-constitutional claims related to a decision by the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to terminate a country’s Temporary Protected Status designation. Under federal immigration laws, certain aliens may remain and work in the United States if the Secretary of DHS designates their countries for TPS because of unstable or dangerous conditions in those countries.
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court reversed the district courts’ orders and remanded the cases for further proceedings. That ruling, known as Mullin v. Doe, was supposed to be the end of the line for these legal challenges.
It wasn’t. Not right away.
Former Secretary Kristi Noem and current Secretary Markwayne Mullin had moved to end South Sudan’s designation after a review of country conditions, with termination originally set for January 5, 2026. A single district judge in Massachusetts, Clinton appointee Patti B. Saris, had previously stayed that termination at the request of African Communities Together and several anonymous Doe plaintiffs, keeping roughly 200-plus South Sudanese TPS holders shielded from removal despite the administration’s determination.
Judge Murphy pulled the same move on the Ethiopia side. In 2022, the Biden administration allowed more than 5,000 Ethiopians to enter the US and live here with special protections. Their TPS status was extended again in April 2024 and expired on February 13, 2026.
Both judges issued their blocking orders after the Supreme Court had already spoken. After Murphy’s order, DHS General Counsel James Percival wrote on X that the district judge was engaged in “mutiny against the Supreme Court,” while he described Saris’ ruling as “open defiance” of the justices’ decision.
That is not hyperbole from a partisan official. In nearly identical rulings, the majority liberal panel found that the lower court judges’ orders conflicted with the Supreme Court’s decision in Mullin v. Doe, which held that courts cannot block TPS terminations based on non-constitutional claims. “Mullin held that ‘the TPS statute’s judicial-review bar applies to all non-constitutional claims’ challenging the Secretary of Homeland Security’s determination with respect to the termination of a TPS designation,” the judges wrote.
The plaintiffs argued DHS unlawfully ended the protections in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution, alleging the agency failed to properly assess conditions in the two countries and that the decisions were motivated by racial discrimination. But the First Circuit found that Mullin foreclosed those statutory arguments entirely, leaving only potential constitutional claims — which still have to be proven from scratch in the lower courts.
The Pattern of Judicial Resistance Is Getting Harder to Ignore
Iowa Solicitor General Eric Wessan, who has been closely tracking the TPS litigation, did not mince words. “These are clear wins for President Trump following his big win at the US Supreme Court, explaining that district courts are not supposed to second guess TPS terminations, and even as this plays out, we’re moving towards the end of this litigation because district courts should not be hearing these disputes, and that’s what the Supreme Court said,” Wessan told Fox News Digital.
But Wessan had also raised an eyebrow at the district court resistance before the First Circuit stepped in. “The Supreme Court ruled that district courts lack jurisdiction to review terminations of temporary protected status. I’m confused why some district courts have not yet removed any remaining road blocks,” Wessan told Fox News Digital.
That confusion is entirely reasonable. Wessan said the district judges were operating outside the “legal bounds” by blocking the TPS terminations before any constitutional claims had been established. “If they want to let the plaintiffs amend their complaint, they’re allowed to do that, but in the meantime, TPS is over,” Wessan told Fox News Digital.
Murphy emerged as a thorn to the government when he issued a series of rulings last year blocking DHS from deporting migrants to countries other than their nations of origin, leading the Supreme Court to twice reverse his rulings, including by issuing a rare 7-2 clarification saying that Murphy had flouted the high court’s order. And yet Murphy kept going. That’s not a judge applying the law. That’s a judge with an agenda.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley pointed to his writings on Murphy, saying “this system cannot function with such rogue operators at the trial level.”
The TPS program was never meant to be a permanent residency pipeline. The word “temporary” is right there in the name. When the executive branch determines that country conditions no longer meet the legal threshold for protection, that determination is supposed to carry weight. Congress wrote the statute that way deliberately — and the Supreme Court confirmed it in June 2026.
What Murphy and Saris tried to do was keep the program alive by procedural maneuvering after the highest court in the land had already ruled. The First Circuit, to its credit, refused to play along.
It’s worth asking how many times this cycle has to repeat before Congress or the judiciary takes the problem of rogue district judges seriously. The First Circuit’s decisions mark the latest setback for Murphy and Saris after the Trump administration accused both judges of effectively sidestepping the Supreme Court’s June ruling. The administration has had to fight the same battles over and over, winning at the Supreme Court only to find a district judge somewhere who decides the ruling doesn’t quite apply to his courtroom.
The voters who sent Donald Trump back to Washington in 2024 did so with a clear mandate on immigration. They wanted the border secured, illegal aliens removed, and programs that were supposed to be temporary actually treated as temporary. Every time a district judge invents a new procedural workaround to delay that mandate, he isn’t protecting anyone’s rights. He’s substituting his own political preferences for the will of the electorate and the judgment of the Supreme Court.
The First Circuit got this one right. But the deeper problem — a network of district judges willing to defy the Supreme Court to obstruct the Trump agenda — isn’t going anywhere on its own.
Sources: Fox News Digital; The Gateway Pundit; Congressional Research Service, Congress.gov; Hannity.com; Axios; capitalisminstitute.org; WND News Center