A Biden-appointed federal judge in Massachusetts issued a stay preserving Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopian nationals just weeks after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that lower courts generally lack authority to block such decisions, and the administration says this same judge previously endangered ICE officers with a similar order.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy on Friday handed down an administrative stay in African Communities Together v. Mullin, temporarily keeping TPS protections in place for Ethiopian nationals while his court considers whether plaintiffs can press forward with constitutional claims. The order came hours after Senior U.S. District Judge Patti Saris, also in Massachusetts, issued her own stay halting the Trump administration's effort to end TPS for South Sudanese nationals.
Both rulings arrived less than a month after the Supreme Court's June 25 decision in Mullin v. Doe, which held 6-3 that lower courts generally cannot hear Administrative Procedure Act challenges, the main federal law governing how agencies must follow their own rules, to DHS decisions designating or terminating TPS. The high court left open a narrow question: whether constitutional claims might still proceed. Murphy and Saris each seized on that opening, preserving protections for their respective plaintiff groups while the constitutional arguments take shape.
Murphy is no stranger to clashing with the administration on immigration enforcement. The Supreme Court has twice sided with the Trump administration against Murphy's orders restricting deportations of illegal immigrants to non-homeland countries. In May 2025, Murphy issued an order halting a deportation flight bound for South Sudan, a move that, Fox News Digital reported, drew a pointed public response from DHS General Counsel James Percival.
Percival took to X after Friday's ruling to revive that earlier episode. He wrote:
"Remember when that district judge rerouted a plane with child rapists headed for South Sudan? The judge made ICE land in Djibouti to face Malaria and terrorist rocket attacks from Yemen. Fun fact: it was the very same Judge Brian Murphy who entered a lawless TPS order today!"
DHS has claimed that Murphy's May 2025 order forced ICE officers to land at a U.S. military base in Djibouti, where they faced malaria exposure and threats of rocket attacks from terrorist groups operating out of Yemen. Those claims have not been independently verified within available reporting, but Percival's decision to resurface them signals how seriously the administration views Murphy as an obstacle.
The legal path here matters. When the Biden administration first granted Ethiopians TPS in 2022, then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas pointed to ongoing armed conflict, widespread violence, human rights abuses, and food insecurity in Ethiopia. TPS protections took effect December 12, 2022, and were extended through December 12, 2025. DHS estimated roughly 26,700 Ethiopian nationals living in the United States qualified.
In December 2025, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem determined that conditions in Ethiopia no longer justified the designation. She announced termination with a 60-day wind-down period, setting February 13, 2026, as the cutoff date.
Challengers filed suit. Earlier this year, Murphy sided with the plaintiffs, granting a motion to postpone the termination after finding they were likely to succeed on their APA claims, essentially, that DHS had not followed proper statutory procedures.
That earlier ruling drew sharp criticism. AP News reported that Murphy ruled the administration terminated Ethiopian TPS "without regard for the process delineated by Congress." In that ruling, Murphy wrote that "the will of the President does not supersede that of Congress" and that "Presidential whims do not and cannot supplant agencies' statutory obligations." DHS spokeswoman Lauren Bis called the decision "just the latest example of judicial activists trying to prevent President Trump from restoring integrity to America's legal immigration system."
Then came the Supreme Court's June 25 ruling in Mullin v. Doe. The 6-3 decision cut the ground out from under Murphy's APA reasoning, holding that federal law makes the homeland security secretary's TPS determinations unreviewable by courts under the APA. The Trump administration argued Murphy's injunction had been fatally undermined and should be lifted.
But the plaintiffs pivoted. They revised their complaint to focus on constitutional claims, the one avenue the Supreme Court had not foreclosed. Murphy's Friday stay keeps TPS protections alive while he considers whether those claims can proceed.
Judge Saris's stay, issued just hours before Murphy's, followed the same logic on a different country. She temporarily halted the administration's effort to terminate TPS for South Sudanese nationals while her court considers whether plaintiffs may amend their lawsuit in light of the Supreme Court ruling. Saris emphasized that her order was "not a ruling on the merits."
Two stays from two judges in the same federal district, both issued on the same day, both relying on the narrow constitutional opening left by a Supreme Court decision that otherwise sided decisively with the administration. The pattern was not lost on conservative legal voices.
Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project, a conservative legal organization, responded on X with a direct call for defiance:
"These Democrat operatives in robes do not have the power to do this. The Supreme Court just made that crystal clear. So it's time to ignore these clearly lawless orders."
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter went further:
"These puny little district court judges have been overruled so many times by the supreme court, especially on immigration, I think it's time for the president to take his constitutional oath seriously, and ignore them."
Those calls reflect a growing frustration on the right with what critics see as a pattern: Democratic-appointed district judges issuing nationwide injunctions on immigration policy, getting reversed at the Supreme Court, and then finding new legal theories to issue fresh orders that produce the same practical result.
Murphy's and Saris's rulings do not exist in isolation. The Trump administration has moved to terminate TPS designations for 13 of the 17 countries that held protections under the Biden administration, affecting more than one million migrants nationwide. Lower courts have repeatedly blocked those efforts. The Washington Examiner reported that multiple Democratic-appointed judges have found that while the TPS determination itself may be unreviewable, the process leading to that determination, whether DHS consulted the right agencies, whether the decision was predetermined, can still be challenged in court.
The Justice Department has pushed back hard. In a brief cited in the Examiner's reporting, DOJ argued that "Congress forbade federal courts to second-guess TPS determinations, no matter whether courts would cavil with the final outcome, the Secretary's decisional process, the substantive reasoning, or something else."
The Supreme Court's Mullin v. Doe decision was supposed to resolve much of this. A 6-3 majority agreed with the administration's position. But by leaving the constitutional door ajar, the court gave judges like Murphy and Saris a foothold, and they used it within weeks.
Fox News Digital reached out to African Communities Together, the plaintiff organization in both the Ethiopia and South Sudan cases, for comment. No response was noted.
Several critical unknowns remain. What specific constitutional provisions are the plaintiffs now invoking? Murphy's order preserves the status quo, but neither the order's text nor its legal reasoning has been made public in detail. The current status of Ethiopia's TPS designation, whether it is technically in effect or suspended, depends entirely on the duration and scope of Murphy's stay, which the court has not clarified.
And the larger question looms: if the Supreme Court rules 6-3 that lower courts cannot hear APA challenges to TPS decisions, and lower courts respond by repackaging the same disputes as constitutional claims and issuing stays that produce identical outcomes, what exactly did the Supreme Court's ruling accomplish?
When the highest court in the country speaks and a district judge finds a way around it within a month, the issue is no longer just about Ethiopian TPS holders, it is about whether Supreme Court rulings mean anything at all.
