A Federal Judge Tried to Slow This Down for Five Months. A Case Bearing the DHS Secretary’s Own Name Just Stopped Her.
- 2,471 Somali nationals DHS says held current or approved TPS status, plus 1,383 more with pending applications — roughly 3,854 nationally, per the case record — DHS figures via Fox News Digital, Aug. 14, 2026
- Nearly 1,100 the separate figure Newsweek and The Hill each reported for people losing status — a materially different count this story attributes to its source rather than resolves — Newsweek; The Hill
- 6-3 the Supreme Court's June 25, 2026 ruling in Mullin v. Doe that Judge Burroughs said left her no path to block the termination — Newsweek; Law360
- 5 Months how long Burroughs's own administrative stay held off DHS's termination order before she lifted it on Friday — Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse docket
- ~90 people convicted in Minnesota's Feeding Our Future child-nutrition fraud, the adjudicated centerpiece of the fraud allegations tied to this story politically — not DHS's legal basis for ending TPS — DOJ; Star Tribune
On Friday, August 14, 2026, U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs lifted the administrative stay she had personally kept in place for five months, clearing the Department of Homeland Security to immediately terminate Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals in African Communities Together v. Noem. The termination took effect the moment her order landed — not on some future compliance date, but instantly. Every A12 and C19 work authorization document tied to Somali TPS became invalid on the spot.
How many people that reaches depends on whose count you read. DHS’s own figures, cited from the case record by Fox News Digital, put current or approved Somali TPS holders at 2,471 to 2,472, plus another 1,383 pending applications — roughly 3,854 nationally. Newsweek and The Hill instead reported “nearly 1,100” people losing status, a materially different figure. Neither number appears fabricated; each is measuring a different slice of DHS’s own accounting, and this story reports both exactly as their sources described them rather than picking one to make a cleaner headline.
What the ruling is not: a final decision on the merits. It lifted Burroughs’s own prior stay — the pause she had imposed on DHS’s January termination order while the underlying lawsuit played out — and that lawsuit continues. “This is a deeply disappointing ruling, but it is not the end of the legal challenge,” said Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Minnesota chapter, the same day.
Termination of TEMPORARY Protected Status is now in effect for the following countries. For those with terminated TPS: LEAVE NOW or be DEPORTED.
Somalia has held Temporary Protected Status longer than most Americans have known the program exists. The designation dates to September 16, 1991, and the federal government renewed it roughly 27 times since, most recently on July 22, 2024. Friday’s order ended that run — stripping legal work status from people who had built jobs, mortgages, and families around a designation the government kept extending for 35 years.
What changed wasn’t a fresh reassessment of Somalia. It was a Supreme Court precedent decided seven weeks earlier that happens to carry the name of the man now running the very agency whose termination decision was being challenged — and it left Burroughs, by her own account, with nowhere left to go.
The reason traces to Mullin v. Doe, decided 6-3 by the Supreme Court on June 25, 2026, with Justice Samuel Alito writing for the majority and Justice Elena Kagan in dissent. The Court held that federal courts generally cannot second-guess a DHS decision to terminate Temporary Protected Status on non-constitutional grounds. The case is captioned Mullin because Markwayne Mullin (R), a former Republican U.S. senator from Oklahoma who now runs DHS, is the current official-capacity defendant — his name attached to the office the moment he took it over from Kristi Noem (R) this spring.
Burroughs wrote that she was bound to view the case in front of her “through the Mullin prism.” What that produced is the sharpest tension in the whole record. Weeks earlier, trying to slow DHS down, she had written about “the shameful cruelty inherent in eschewing a ‘wind down period’” for people facing deportation. In Friday’s order, she went further still: she found the plaintiffs had made “a strong case for why the at-issue statements were racist,” and she did not dispute “the life altering consequences of this decision for the affected Somali TPS beneficiaries.” Then she ruled against them anyway.
“The Court cannot discern a path to concluding that Plaintiffs will succeed on the merits of this claim.”
Judge Allison D. Burroughs, order lifting the stay, Aug. 14, 2026
Burroughs, appointed to the federal bench by President Obama in 2014, had spent five months finding procedural ways to delay an outcome she plainly found troubling. Once the Supreme Court spoke in a case bearing the current DHS Secretary’s own name, she concluded the law gave her no room left to keep doing it.
That didn’t stop members of Congress from framing her delay as defiance rather than diligence. In early August, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) filed articles of impeachment against Burroughs, accusing her of ignoring the Supreme Court to force what he called mass migration from Somalia into American communities. Her written opinion, issued days later, cites Mullin v. Doe as its reasoning — not Ogles’s impeachment push. The two events sit close together on the calendar; nothing in the public record supports treating one as the cause of the other.
“I have just introduced articles of impeachment against radical judicial activist Judge Allison Burroughs for ignoring the Supreme Court and attempting to force mass migration from Somalia into American communities.”
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), public statement, early August 2026
The timeline runs longer than the five-month stay suggests. On November 21, 2025, President Trump announced on Truth Social that he intended to end TPS for Somalis in Minnesota, tying the move to fraud allegations in the state. Four weeks later, on December 19, he attached a specific dollar figure to the allegation.
Nine Billion Dollars was STOLEN FROM THE STATE OF MINNESOTA by Illegal Somalian Criminals. They must pay a big price, NOW!!!
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Reconstructed from public reporting on Trump's Minnesota-fraud posts from this period; the exact wording could not be independently re-verified against Truth Social's archive, though the $9B figure and date are consistent with contemporaneous coverage.
Three weeks after that, on January 13, 2026, he posted again, promising accountability without naming a specific mechanism.
THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Part of a longer post tying Minnesota fraud allegations to the administration's Somalia TPS decision.
The formal legal process followed the next day. On January 14, 2026, then-Secretary Kristi Noem (R) published the termination notice in the Federal Register, setting an effective date of March 17. Noem was removed as DHS Secretary before that date arrived — Markwayne Mullin (R) was installed in her place by late March — and on March 9, the advocacy group African Communities Together sued to block the termination. Burroughs granted her administrative stay on March 13, four days before the original deadline. It held until Friday.
DHS’s legal justification for ending Somali TPS has nothing to do with fraud. The Federal Register notice Noem signed rests entirely on a finding about the country itself.
“Temporary means temporary. Country conditions in Somalia have improved to the point that it no longer meets the law's requirement for Temporary Protected Status.”
then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem (R), Federal Register notice, Jan. 14, 2026
That is the government’s stated legal basis, in full, and it is worth being precise about what it is not: it is not a fraud finding, and Friday’s ruling did not adjudicate any fraud claim. The politics ran on a separate, parallel track.
The $9 billion figure Trump cited belongs to a broader, ongoing federal inquiry: prosecutors have estimated that roughly $18 billion moved through 14 Minnesota public-benefit programs since 2018, with half or more of it potentially taken fraudulently. The adjudicated centerpiece of that inquiry is the Feeding Our Future child-nutrition-program fraud, in which prosecutors say roughly $250 million was stolen and roughly 90 people have been convicted — most of Somali descent, including Aimee Bock and Salim Said, both convicted at trial. Those cases are real and litigated. They are not, legally, the reason DHS gave for ending TPS — even though they are almost certainly the reason the decision became a national story.
Minnesota’s Democratic officials pushed back on the original November threat, not on Friday’s ruling specifically. Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) called it predictable: “It’s not surprising that the president has chosen to broadly target an entire community. This is what he does to change the subject.” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN-5) told constituents, “If you are confused, if you feel threatened, know that the law is on your side.” Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) argued the president “cannot legally wield that power to discriminate against an ethnic group or to target a state, like MN.”
Governor: Tim Walz (D)
Attorney General: Keith Ellison (D)
U.S. Senator: Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
U.S. Representative, MN-5: Ilhan Omar (D)
State Senator, Minneapolis: Zaynab Mohamed (DFL)
Speaker, MN House: Lisa Demuth (R)
Friday’s order lifted a stay, not the case. African Communities Together’s underlying lawsuit continues in Burroughs’s courtroom, and nothing in her opinion resolves whether DHS’s “improved country conditions” finding will ultimately hold up. Hussein put it plainly: “If TPS protections do not apply to Somalia under the conditions it faces today, then we have to ask what remains of the program’s purpose.” That question — not Friday’s headline — is what the rest of the litigation will decide.
Judge Allison Burroughs lifted her own five-month stay on Friday, clearing DHS to immediately end Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals — a group DHS counts at roughly 3,854 nationally, though other outlets report “nearly 1,100.” The ruling only lifted a stay; it is not a final merits judgment, and the underlying case continues. Burroughs found the case’s underlying statements “racist” and the process “cruel,” but ruled for DHS anyway because Mullin v. Doe— a Supreme Court case bearing current DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s (R) own name — left her, in her own words, no path to rule otherwise. DHS’s stated legal basis is a finding that conditions in Somalia have improved; the $9 billion Minnesota fraud figure President Trump cited politically is a separate, ongoing federal matter that was never the government’s legal argument for ending TPS.
