A federal judge in Boston removed the last legal barrier to ending deportation protections for Somali nationals on Friday, Aug. 14, and she did it by lifting an order she had issued herself. U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, of the District of Massachusetts, dissolved the administrative stay that had frozen the Department of Homeland Security from terminating Temporary Protected Status for Somalia, a designation the country has held since 1991 [1][2][3].
The reason she gave was not that the Somali plaintiffs were wrong. It was that the Supreme Court had put the question beyond her reach. On June 25, 2026, the high court decided Mullin v. Doe, holding that federal courts lack the authority to review DHS terminations of TPS designations [1][3]. Burroughs wrote that she was 'bound ... to view things through the Mullin prism,' even as she acknowledged that 'Plaintiffs have made a convincing showing that they will suffer irreparable harm' [1].
That is the whole of the story in two sentences: a judge who found real harm concluded she no longer had the power to stop it.
The termination itself is not new. Then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem published the notice ending Somalia's designation in January 2026, with the cutoff set for March. 'Temporary means temporary,' Noem said in announcing it. 'Country conditions in Somalia have improved to the point that it no longer meets the law's requirement for Temporary Protected Status' [2]. Litigation brought by Somali nationals and advocacy groups, among them African Communities Together, paused the clock. That stay held until Friday's order released it [2].
Who is affected is where the reporting splits, and the gap is wide enough that it should not be smoothed over. KSTP estimates roughly 700 Somali nationals hold TPS [2]. Fox News reports a larger pool: 2,471 people currently holding the status and another 1,383 with pending applications [1]. The counts are not reconciled, and the difference matters because it is the difference between a few hundred people and nearly four thousand losing their footing at once. What every account agrees on is the scale of the community that is not touched: the long-settled Somali population, about 108,000 in Minnesota alone, is overwhelmingly made up of citizens and permanent residents who never held TPS [2].
The plaintiffs had argued the termination was driven by racial bias, pointing to the president's past descriptions of Somalis as 'garbage' and 'low IQ people' [1]. Burroughs, at this stage of the case, declined to rule that the discrimination claim was likely to succeed. The exact language of her equal-protection finding has circulated in secondary reporting but was not one of the passages captured verbatim from a fetched primary source, so it is paraphrased here: she treated the plaintiffs' racial-discrimination argument as serious but found no path, under the Mullin standard, to conclude they would prevail on it.
The respondent's name on the controlling Supreme Court case is itself the tell about who now runs the department. Mullin v. Doe carries the name of Markwayne Mullin, the current Secretary of Homeland Security. Noem, who signed the January notice, was his predecessor. The case that stripped the courts of review power bears the name of the official who now benefits from it.
Two things remain open. The first is timing: with the stay gone, the termination can take effect, but the precise date on which protection lapses, and whether DHS restarts the March clock or sets a new one, was not stated in the available reporting. The second is the appeal. The plaintiffs lost the stay, not necessarily the war, and nothing in Friday's order forecloses them from carrying the equal-protection claim forward. For the Somali TPS holders themselves, though, the practical reality arrives first. Unless they can establish another lawful basis to remain, they face removal proceedings while any appeal is still being briefed.
