- Court sides with immigrant groups challenging USCIS restrictions.
- Thousands of TPS holders retain work authorization temporarily.
- A federal judge will review the request for a longer break by 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 passed by Congress last year.
Gorton’s order will be in place until he decides whether to issue a longer-term pause in the Trump administration’s policy. The judge said he would rule on it by August 5. USCIS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s signature tax and spending bill, passed by the Republican-led Congress in July 2025, imposed fees for the first time to apply for asylum and limited employment authorization for people with Temporary Protected Status, or TPS.
It is a designation that allows migrants from countries affected by war, natural disasters or other disasters to live and work in the United States while it is unsafe 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. The US Supreme Court last month allowed it to do so in the case of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants.
The plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by the liberal legal group Democracy Forward argued that USCIS had illegally implemented the new law’s provisions and that its policies should be halted, particularly one that would lead to thousands of TPS holders from El Salvador, Sudan and Ukraine potentially losing their ability to work starting Wednesday.
Among those policies are ones that the plaintiffs say wrongly shortened the time TPS holders would be authorized to work by applying the new restrictions retroactively to people from El Salvador, Sudan and Ukraine.
Skye Perryman, Democracy Forward’s president and CEO, said in a statement that Gorton’s decision ensures that thousands of families will not lose their livelihoods while the courts consider the legality of the administration’s policies.
While the administration has ended TPS for other countries, it extended TPS for people from these three nations in January. TPS remains valid for El Salvador until September 9 and for Sudan and Ukraine until October 19.
The plaintiffs argued that the new USCIS policies were invalid because the public never received notice and a chance to comment on them before they were adopted, as required by the Administrative Procedure Act, and applied the 2025 Act’s TPS work authorization provisions retroactively without statutory authorization.
Gorton on Tuesday declined to block USCIS from collecting the fee for now, but said the agency cannot strip people who fail to pay it of work permits or impose other penalties.
The case was filed in Boston, a venue popular with litigants challenging Trump’s agenda, and landed before one of the few judges on the court not appointed by a Democrat, Gorton, an appointee of Republican President George HW Bush.
