A federal judge on Tuesday blocked plans by the Trump administration to end temporary protections from deportation that had been granted to hundreds of South Sudanese nationals living in the United States.
US district judge Angel Kelley in Boston granted an emergency request by several South Sudanese nationals and an immigrant rights group to prevent the temporary protected status they had been granted from expiring as planned after 5 January.
The ruling is a temporary victory for immigrant advocates and a setback for the Trump administration’s broader effort to curtail the humanitarian program. It is the latest in a series of legal challenges to the administration’s moves to end similar protections for nationals from several other countries, including Syria, Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua.
Kelley, who was appointed by the Democratic former president Joe Biden, issued the order after four migrants from South Sudan along with African Communities Together, a non-profit group, sued. The lawsuit alleged that action by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was unlawful and exposed them to being deported to a country facing a series of humanitarian crises.
Kelley issued an administrative stay that temporarily blocks the policy pending further litigation.
She wrote that allowing it to take effect before the courts had time to consider the case’s merits “would result in an immediate impact on the South Sudanese nationals, stripping current beneficiaries of lawful status, which could imminently result in their deportation”.
Homeland security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the judge’s ruling ignored Trump’s constitutional and statutory authority and that the temporary protected status extended to South Sudanese nationals “was never intended to be a de facto asylum program”.
South Sudan has been ravaged by conflict since winning independence from Sudan in 2011. Fighting has persisted in much of the country since the end in 2018 of a five-year civil war that killed an estimated 400,000 people, and the US Department of State advises citizens not to travel there.
The United States began designating South Sudan for temporary protected status, or TPS, in 2011.
That status is available to people whose home countries have experienced natural disasters, armed conflicts or other extraordinary events. It provides eligible migrants with work authorization and temporary protection from deportation.
About 232 South Sudanese nationals have been beneficiaries of TPS and have found refuge in the United States, and another 73 have pending applications for that same protection, according to the lawsuit.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, published a notice on 5 November terminating TPS for South Sudan, saying the country no longer met the conditions for the designation. Her department has moved to similarly end temporary protections to foreign nationals from countries including Syria, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua, prompting several court challenges.
“With the renewed peace in South Sudan, their demonstrated commitment to ensuring the safe reintegration of returning nationals, and improved diplomatic relations, now is the right time to conclude what was always intended to be a temporary designation,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement ahead of the court ruling.
The lawsuit argues the agency’s action violated the statute governing the TPS program, ignored the dire humanitarian conditions that remain in South Sudan and was motivated by discrimination against migrants who are not white in violation of the US constitution’s fifth amendment.
“The singular aim of this mass deportation agenda is to remove as many Black and brown immigrants from this country as quickly and as cruelly as possible,” Diana Konate, deputy executive director of policy and advocacy at African Communities Together, said in a statement.
