A federal appellate court shot down on Wednesday attempts by a pair of rogue judges to sidestep a recent Supreme Court immigration ruling.
In its newly released orders, a three-judge panel on the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Massachusetts-based Judges Patti Saris and Brian Murphy’s administrative pauses against the Trump administration. Those directives sought to stop the government from ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for foreign nationals from South Sudan and Ethiopia, respectively.
The panel was comprised of Judges Julie Rickelman and Seth Aframe, both Biden appointees, and Joshua Dunlap, a Trump appointee.
Saris and Murphy’s actions were seen as an effort to effectively sidestep the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with the administration on the TPS issue last month. In a 6-3 ruling by Justice Samuel Alito, the high court held that the TPS statute bars federal courts from reviewing non-constitutional claims against the government’s TPS decisions and further shot down a constitutional claim by one of the respondents that the president’s termination of TPS for Haitians was racially motivated.
CNN subsequently reported on Monday about challengers’ efforts to repackage their prior procedural arguments “into new constitutional claims or signaled plans to do so soon” in an apparent attempt to runaround Mullin. Saris and Murphy — the latter of whom has a track record of defying SCOTUS — indicated their administrative stays were issued to give challengers time to amend their initial complaints against the government.
The 1st Circuit panel said that its decision to reverse those postponement orders is “in light of” the Mullin v. Doe ruling.
“Mullin held that ‘the TPS statute’s judicial-review bar applies to all non-constitutional claims’ challenging the Secretary of Homeland Security’s determination with respect to the termination of a TPS designation. … Claims of that nature were the only basis for the postponement order on appeal,” the court ruled. “Accordingly, the government’s request for summary reversal is allowed. Its additional request for a stay pending appeal is denied as moot.”
The circuit panel additionally remanded the cases back to the district courts “for further proceedings in light of and consistent with Mullin.”
While favorable for the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security is warning that Wednesday’s rulings likely won’t mark the end of rogue judges’ efforts to runaround Mullin v. Doe. In response to the 1st Circuit’s reversal of Saris on X, DHS General Counsel James Percival noted that while the overturning of the district judge’s stay is a “great win to be sure,” Saris “already indicated that she would enter a new order postponing the termination on remand.”
“That is the absurdity we are facing,” Percival added.
