Court Halts Trump’s Attack on Humanitarian Protection for Migrants – A Beautiful but Hard-Won Victory

A federal court, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, ruled late Wednesday that the Trump administration acted unlawfully when it sought to revoke deportation protection for tens of thousands of migrants from Honduras, Nepal, and Nicaragua. The decision strikes at a central pillar of Trump’s deportation policy – the targeted attack on the Temporary Protected Status program (TPS), which is meant to shield people from crisis-stricken countries from being sent back.

In her 52-page ruling, case number 3:25-cv-01766 (N.D. Cal.), Judge Trina L. Thompson found that the actions of the Department of Homeland Security under Kristi Noem were politically predetermined from the outset. Neither the ongoing food shortages in Nepal, nor the extreme levels of violence in Honduras, nor the humanitarian emergency in Nicaragua were properly taken into account. Instead of an objective assessment, the department worked toward a desired outcome – ending the protection at any cost.

The judge also addressed statements by Donald Trump and Kristi Noem in which people under TPS were broadly portrayed as violent criminals. Such statements, Thompson wrote, support the suspicion of racist motives. The lawsuit was filed by the National TPS Alliance, the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project (FIRRP), journalists, human rights NGOs, and several individuals – including Jhony Silva, a 30-year-old caregiver from Honduras who has lived in the United States since he was three years old and lost his job due to the threatened loss of his protected status. This protection also applies to children whom the Trump administration attempted to deport in September 2025 – and for whose right to remain we also fought.

About 50,000 Hondurans, 7,000 Nepalis, and 3,000 Nicaraguans currently live in the United States under TPS. The program has existed for decades and has been repeatedly extended – for countries where wars, natural disasters, or other crises make return unreasonable. For months, the Trump administration has been trying to terminate protections for more than one million people from eight countries. In Boston, another court had already temporarily blocked the planned termination of protection for South Sudanese nationals on Tuesday. At the same time, the Supreme Court continues to allow the administration to end the program for other groups – most recently for more than 300,000 people from Venezuela. Lawsuits and investigations are ongoing in those cases as well.

The ruling from San Francisco marks an important turning point. Not only legally, but also morally. It is a reminder that deportation policy is not a show – and that human rights apply even when governments would prefer to erase them.