The Trump administration’s bid to end temporary protected status for Somalia is facing a new lawsuit, as the administration turns to the Supreme Court to help end TPS for people from Syria and Haiti.
Efforts to end TPS designations for various countries have been met with lawsuits from activist groups, as the Trump administration argues that the temporary protections given to foreign nationals from affected countries no longer meet the legal requirements for the status. While the Supreme Court has sided with the Trump administration twice over its contested effort to end TPS for people from Venezuela, lower courts have since continued to block the Trump administration from revoking those same temporary protections for people from other countries.
A pair of activist groups, along with four Somali nationals, sued the Department of Homeland Security in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, alleging the administration’s attempt to end TPS for the country is unlawful for several reasons.
The lawsuit claims the conditions in Somalia are a humanitarian crisis, which supports extending the temporary status that has been in place since 1991, and that DHS’s process of ending the status was a reflection of the administration’s “preordained, pretextual, politically influenced agendas.”
The groups claim the administration failed to “undertake a good faith review of objective evidence of country conditions relevant to the legal grounds for Somalia’s TPS designation” and that the decision was “impermissibly relying on the Administration’s determination about the domestic ‘national interest’ as a basis for termination.” The lawsuit additionally claims the decision was “motivated, at least in part, by racial and national-origin discrimination towards Somali people, in violation of the Fifth Amendment.”
Federal law establishing TPS explicitly does not allow courts to review the Homeland Security secretary’s determination to extend or terminate TPS for different countries. But several judges have gone around this by reviewing the procedure the DHS followed to make the otherwise unreviewable determination. The Trump administration has had trouble revoking TPS, whereas the Biden administration has been able to extend it easily through simple orders without legal battles.
The lawsuit challenging the revocation of TPS for Somalia targets the administration’s procedure for reaching that decision, attempting to replicate the success of other lawsuits that have undermined those unreviewable decisions.
Trump initially announced he would be stripping Somalia of its TPS status in November. His announcement came amid increased scrutiny of allegedly widespread fraud in Minnesota, specifically regarding reports of a fraud scheme that resulted in taxpayer dollars eventually ending up in the hands of the Somali-based al-Shabaab terrorist group.
“I am, as President of the United States, hereby terminating, effective immediately, the Temporary Protected Status (TPS Program) for Somalis in Minnesota. Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing. Send them back to where they came from. It’s OVER!” Trump said in a Truth Social post in November.
The current TPS designation for Somalia is set to expire on March 17, and the activist groups are asking for the court to step in by the end of that day. The lawsuit over the end of TPS for Somalia has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, an appointee of former President Barack Obama.
The lawsuit over Somalia’s TPS designation comes as the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to lift a lower court’s block on ending TPS for Syria, and the DOJ is poised to ask the high court to lift a lower court’s block on ending TPS for Haiti as well.
On Friday evening, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in a 2-1 ruling, denied a bid by the Trump administration to lift a block on ending TPS for Haiti. The initial ruling blocking the termination of the status came from U.S. District Judge Patti Saris, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, who claimed the decision was unlawfully “pretextual,” meaning the judge believed the administration’s stated reasons were hiding illegal motives, and pointed to the alleged racial animus by officials toward Haitians in making the decision.
In a letter to the Supreme Court filed to the emergency docket in the case over ending TPS for Syria, Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices the Haiti case “involves issues that are materially similar to those in” the Syria case. Sauer argued that the similarities in the cases, along with the various challenges to other terminations of TPS, make it ripe for the high court to take up one of the cases and place it on its merits docket for a full hearing and ruling.
“The order thus further entrenches the division among circuits addressing materially similar cases in materially similar postures, and further supports the government’s request for certiorari before judgment,” Sauer said in his Monday letter. “The government intends to file a separate application seeking a stay of the district court order in the Haiti case in the coming days.”
The Supreme Court previously lifted lower court blocks of the Trump administration’s efforts to revoke TPS for Venezuela twice last year, although the justices offered no reasoning in their majority opinions, leaving the door open for lower courts to continue blocking the termination of TPS for other countries without technically running afoul of any specific guidance from the high court.
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The Trump administration has generally suffered lower-court losses in TPS cases for two reasons: Judicial overreach by district court judges and, in some instances, the administration’s own failure to follow proper procedure. The Supreme Court taking up one of the open cases to its full merits docket could end the legal war, and would mark the latest instance of the justices taking on one of the Trump administration’s heated battles with the judiciary.
The Supreme Court has already ruled on cases involving universal injunctions and the president’s sweeping tariffs, and is set to rule on his firing of independent agency heads and executive order regarding birthright citizenship in the coming months.