- Court sides with immigrant groups challenging USCIS restrictions.
- Thousands of TPS beneficiaries temporarily retain work authorization.
- A federal judge reviews the request for a longer pause before August 5.
A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from stripping tens of thousands of asylum seekers and immigrants who have Temporary Protected Status of their ability to work in the United States.
U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton in Boston sided with a coalition of immigrant rights groups and labor unions that sued to block U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from moving forward with a series of policies designed to implement new immigration-related restrictions enacted by Congress last year.
Gorton’s order will be in effect until he decides whether to issue a longer-term pause on the Trump administration’s policy. The judge said he would rule on the matter on August 5. USCIS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s signature tax and spending law, passed by the Republican-led Congress in July 2025, for the first time imposed fees to apply for asylum and restricted employment authorization for people with Temporary Protected Status, or TPS.
This is a designation that allows immigrants from countries affected by war, natural disasters or other catastrophes to live and work in the United States while it is not safe for them to return to their home countries.
The Trump administration has sought, as part of the Republican president’s tough immigration agenda, to end TPS for people from more than a dozen countries. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed him to do so in the case of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants.
Plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by the liberal legal group Democracy Forward argued that USCIS had illegally implemented provisions of the new law and that its policies should be stopped, particularly one that would lead to thousands of TPS recipients from El Salvador, Sudan and Ukraine potentially losing their ability to work starting Wednesday.
Among those policies are those that, according to the plaintiffs, wrongly shorten the time that TPS holders would be authorized to work by retroactively applying the new restrictions to people from El Salvador, Sudan and Ukraine.
Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement that Gorton’s ruling ensures that thousands of families will not lose their livelihoods while courts consider whether the administration’s policies are legal.
While the administration has been canceling TPS for other countries, in January it extended TPS for people from those three nations. TPS remains valid for El Salvador until September 9 and for Sudan and Ukraine until October 19.
The plaintiffs argued that USCIS’s new policies were invalid because the public was never given notice or opportunity to comment on them before their adoption, as required by the Administrative Procedure Act, and they applied the TPS work authorization provisions of the 2025 law retroactively without legal authorization.
Gorton on Tuesday declined to stop USCIS from collecting the fee for now, but said the agency cannot strip people who don’t pay it of their work permits or impose other penalties.
The case was filed in Boston, a popular location for litigants challenging Trump’s agenda, and came before one of the court’s few judges not appointed by a Democrat, Gorton, an appointee of Republican President George HW Bush.
