Somali TPS Appeal: 17 Attorneys General Back Restoration

Somali TPS holders picked up support from 17 attorneys general this week, as Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison led a friend-of-the-court brief asking a federal appeals court to block the Trump administration’s termination of Temporary Protected Status for Somalia. The brief, filed Oct. 26 in African Communities Together v. Mullin, backs plaintiffs who lost their bid for emergency relief in Boston in August, and it leans almost entirely on the harm the termination is doing to families, schools and local economies.

That focus is also the brief’s limit. The trial judge already agreed the harm was real. She ruled against the Somali plaintiffs anyway, because after the Supreme Court’s June decision in Mullin v. Doe almost nothing about a TPS termination can be reviewed in court except a constitutional claim, and she found theirs unlikely to succeed.

What the Somali TPS brief argues

The coalition includes Minnesota, California, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. According to Ellison’s office, the brief argues that ending protection forces parents into a choice between leaving U.S.-citizen children behind, taking them to Somalia, or staying without permission to work, and that fear of enforcement keeps families from medical care and children from school.

The states also put a price on it, citing at least 53,000 Somali immigrants in the coalition states, at least 37,500 of them in Minnesota, and about $228 million a year in state and local taxes. Those figures describe the wider Somali community, a group many times larger than the TPS population.

The TPS group itself is far smaller, and the counts do not line up neatly. Ellison’s office puts it at about 3,850 people who held Somali TPS or had applications pending. DHS counted 1,080 current beneficiaries as of June 25, 2026, according to a Congressional Research Service fact sheet. The gap likely reflects pending applicants, so the larger number should not be read as the count of people now losing protection.

Why the harm argument may not carry the appeal

DHS announced the termination in a Jan. 14 Federal Register notice, finding that Somalia “no longer continues to meet the conditions for designation” and now shows “improved national governance and security structures” with “localized pockets of violence rather than nationwide, generalized conflict.” The notice set a March 17, 2026, end date. A lawsuit filed in March by two immigrant groups and Somali TPS holders kept that date from taking effect for months.

Then came Mullin v. Doe. On June 25, the Supreme Court held that the TPS statute’s bar on judicial review, 8 U.S.C. 1254a(b)(5)(A), covers every non-constitutional challenge to a termination. In an Aug. 14 order, U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs applied that ruling to the Somali case. She kept jurisdiction over the constitutional claims but found the plaintiffs unlikely to win them. On due process, she wrote that interests in procedure “are not ‘property'” under the Constitution, and she rejected the equal protection theory at this stage. With likelihood of success missing, her findings that the plaintiffs faced irreparable harm and that the equities favored them did not change the outcome. She denied relief and lifted the administrative stay, and Ellison’s office says DHS revoked Somali TPS that day.

An amicus brief built on harm therefore reinforces factors the plaintiffs already won. To reverse, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which hears appeals from Massachusetts, would have to see the constitutional claims differently than the trial judge did. The First Circuit has already shown how it reads Mullin: in July it reversed a lower-court order that had postponed the termination of TPS for South Sudan, citing the Supreme Court’s decision.

The strongest opening for the plaintiffs is the equal protection question. The Supreme Court in Mullin left open whether the review bar reaches those claims at all, and Judge Burroughs said national origin classifications likely draw strict scrutiny, the toughest standard, while calling the law unsettled. A ruling on that point would reach well beyond Somalia, since equal protection is now the main path left for challenging any TPS termination.

Filing a brief does not restore anything. Unless the First Circuit grants relief, Somali nationals who relied on TPS no longer have that protection or the work authorization tied to it, and their options depend on whatever else they have: a pending asylum case, a family or employment petition, or another status. Somalia is one of 13 TPS countries terminated since 2025.

With procedural challenges closed off, the Somali appeal is one of several fights over ending humanitarian protections that now turn on narrow constitutional questions or on timing, alongside the refugee status termination rule paused in Boston, the uncertainty over Ukraine and Sudan TPS and Social Security checks for Salvadoran TPS holders.

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

Administrator

Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds a LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Deigo and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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