A federal judge in Boston did not clear the way to deport Somali nationals. On Friday, August 1, 2026, Judge Allison Burroughs issued an administrative stay that blocks the Trump administration from ending Temporary Protected Status for Somalia, and Somalia's TPS remained in place as of that reporting [1].
The Benny Johnson show told viewers the reverse. A video carrying the title "Massive Court Victory Clears Way For Trump to DEPORT Every Somali in America Illegally BACK Home" states, on camera, that "a federal judge has cleared the way for the Trump administration to end the temporary protected status for South Sudan and Somalia" [2]. For Somalia that is false. The ruling that week did not open the door to ending Somali TPS; it held that door shut.
There is a real TPS termination underneath this story, which is why the error is easy to make and worth spelling out. The court action that actually advanced was specific to South Sudan, a distinct and smaller protected population, not Somalia [1]. Anyone tracking the immigration docket that week would have seen a genuine termination move. The mistake is transplanting the South Sudan outcome onto Somalia, where the same window produced the opposite result: a stay that preserved the status.
South Sudan and Somalia are separate countries with separate TPS designations, and a ruling on one does not decide the other. Collapsing them into a single "South Sudan and Somalia" sentence is how a blocking order for Somalia gets reported as its end.
The title's phrasing carries a second error. It describes the affected people as "every Somali in America illegally," but Temporary Protected Status is a lawful status. People who hold it are present with the federal government's permission, work with authorization, and are not in the country illegally. Casting TPS holders as unlawful migrants misstates what the program is before the sentence even reaches the court ruling.
What did happen is narrower and, for the administration, a setback rather than a win. Judge Burroughs, an Obama appointee, entered an administrative stay on August 1 that keeps Somalia's TPS in force while the litigation proceeds [1]. That is a procedural hold, not a final judgment, and the status of Somalia's TPS should be checked against any later ruling before it is treated as settled.
The distance between the two accounts is the whole point. A show framed a court order that protected a lawfully present population as a court order that cleared their removal. The people on the receiving end are Somali TPS holders living and working in the United States who were told their deportation had just been greenlit, when the judge had done the opposite.
