US judge allows deportation protections to end for South Sudanese

By Nate Raymond

Aug 7 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Friday cleared the way for U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to end temporary protections from deportation that had allowed hundreds of South Sudanese nationals to live and work in the United States.

U.S. District Judge Patti Saris in Boston rejected a last-ditch effort by immigrant-rights advocates to maintain South Sudan’s Temporary Protected Status designation after the U.S. Supreme Court in June allowed the administration to end similar protections for thousands of people from Haiti and Syria.

The Supreme Court’s ruling, powered by its 6-3 conservative majority, curtailed the ability of lower-court judges to review the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s efforts under Trump to end TPS for about a dozen countries.

That designation covers people whose home countries have experienced natural disasters, armed conflicts or other extraordinary events, providing eligible ​migrants temporary protection from deportation and work authorization.

DHS moved in November to terminate TPS for conflict-ridden South Sudan, saying the country no longer met the conditions for the designation, which was first issued in 2011. 

The department’s action would have led to the end of protections for more than 232 South Sudanese and at least 73 South Sudanese with pending applications. An earlier order by Saris had blocked that from happening.

LEGAL CHALLENGE ON NEW GROUNDS

After the Supreme Court’s ruling, lawyers for a group of South Sudanese nationals and the nonprofit African Communities Together urged Saris to once again block the end of TPS on new grounds that the justices had not addressed.

That included an argument that DHS lacked authority to terminate TPS because the statute that created the TPS program in 1990 referred only to the attorney general as the official who had authority to extend and terminate the deportation protections. 

DHS was established later, in 2002, after the attacks of September 11, 2001. 

Most of the U.S. Department of Justice’s immigration-related functions were transferred to it at that time. Saris, who was appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, concluded Congress had likewise transferred authority over TPS to DHS.

She said arguments to the contrary rested on a “self-contradictory, self-defeating foundation,” since if DHS had no authority to terminate TPS for South Sudan it also never had the ability to extend protections in the first place.

“South Sudan’s original TPS designation would thus be invalid by the same token as its termination,” she said.    

James Percival, DHS’s general counsel, in a social media post on X urged other judges hearing similar TPS cases to follow Saris and lift orders preventing it from ending the protections for people from other countries.

“Every day these ‘administrative stays’ are in effect is a day the American people are denied what they voted for,” he said.

Spokespeople for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Matthew Lewis)