By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Aug 18 (Reuters) – A federal judge allowed U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday to end legal protections granted to over 5,000 Ethiopians that have allowed them to live and work in the United States.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston lifted the last judicial block on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security terminating the Temporary Protected Status designation for individual countries after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the administration in June to end similar protections for thousands of people from Haiti and Syria.
The Supreme Court’s ruling, backed by its 6-3 conservative majority, curtailed the ability of judges to review DHS efforts under Trump to end TPS designations for 13 countries that provided humanitarian immigration protection to eligible migrants from those nations.
James Percival, DHS’ general counsel, hailed the decision in a social media post. “All TPS terminations are in effect!” he wrote.
LIVES AT RISK: ADVOCACY GROUP
The termination of Ethiopia’s TPS designation had been challenged by several Ethiopian nationals and the advocacy group African Communities Together, which expressed disappointment in Tuesday’s ruling.
“The crisis in Ethiopia is still ongoing, and this decision puts the lives of thousands of Ethiopians living in the U.S. at severe risk,” said Diana Konaté, the group’s deputy executive director of policy and advocacy.
TPS under federal law 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.
Former Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration first granted Ethiopians already in the United States that status beginning in 2022, citing the need to protect the African nation’s citizens from armed conflict and humanitarian suffering.
DHS under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced in December it would end those protections on the grounds that conditions no longer posed a serious threat to Ethiopians returning safely.
Murphy blocked DHS’ action in April, saying it disregarded statutory procedures and provided a “pretextual” rationale for ending the protections.
After the Supreme Court ruled, Murphy issued a new order that continued to temporarily block the end of the Ethiopians’ TPS while he considered whether to continue to halt DHS’ action on grounds that the Supreme Court’s ruling did not address.
Those arguments included that the 1990 statute creating TPS gave only the attorney general authority to extend or terminate the deportation protections, not DHS, which was established later after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Judges in similar cases involving people from South Sudan, Myanmar and Somalia have rejected that argument in recent days, and Murphy did as well on Tuesday.
He dismissed that and other claims, but he said he would allow the plaintiffs to continue to litigate over whether DHS’s action was motivated by racial or national origin animus in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.
The plaintiffs argued that the administration ignored how dangerous conditions persist in Ethiopia and that the termination of its TPS designation was part of a practice of eliminating deportation protections for people who are non-white and non-European.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Aurora Ellis and Rod Nickel)
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