Judge approves Trump effort to end South Sudan TPS protections

On Friday, US district judge Patti Saris of the district of Massachusetts rejected an attempt by immigrant rights organizations including the New York-based African Communities Together to keep Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for South Sudanese nationals living in the US.

Saris’s decision follows a 6-3 supreme court ruling in June allowing the Trump administration to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians of TPS, which granted them permission to work and live legally in the US.

A TPS designation allows eligible people from certain countries facing crises including civil war and environmental disasters to remain in the US temporarily, protects them from deportation and allows them to work legally. In her 15-page ruling, Saris wrote that “as a logical matter, plaintiffs’ arguments rest upon a self-contradictory, self-defeating foundation”. According to Saris, the plaintiffs’ argument undermined itself, because if the homeland security department (DHS) lacked the authority to terminate South Sudan’s TPS designation, it also would have lacked the authority to issue the designation initially.

Losing TPS can leave immigrants without legal status vulnerable to arrest, detention and deportation, even with pending asylum or green card applications. Some may face immigration court proceedings with limited options to stay in the US. People ordered removed could be deported and barred from returning for years.

Meanwhile, in a statement on Friday, the immigrant advocacy organization Global Refuge condemned the ruling. The CEO, Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, said: “The reality of the situation is that South Sudan is on the brink of a return to an all-out-civil war. Roughly two-thirds of the population, some 10 million people, now depend on humanitarian aid to survive.