Obama Judge Who Blocked Somali Deportations Just Changed Her Mind — After This Threat From GOP Lawmaker
There has never been so much left-wing judicial activism coming from federal courts in the age of Donald Trump, but thanks to pushback from a Republican congressman, at least one of those judges felt enough heat to do the right thing.
On Friday, Burroughs denied the plaintiffs’ bid to keep Somalia’s TPS designation alive and lifted her own administrative stay
Judge Allison Burroughs — an Obama appointee in Massachusetts — spent months blocking the Trump administration’s termination of Somalia’s Temporary Protected Status designation, which had been scheduled to take effect March 17. She stepped in just four days before it was supposed to become effective and imposed an administrative stay. Then Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn. ) introduced articles of impeachment against her for defying the U. S. Supreme Court’s explicit ruling on TPS termination. And then, like magic, she had a change of heart. The legal reasoning she applied was the same reasoning conservatives had been making for months. “Because TPS beneficiaries will receive future benefits if — but only if — the Secretary decides to extend the designation of their country of origin… they have nothing ‘more than a unilateral expectation’ in their future TPS eligibility,” Burroughs wrote.
Temporary means temporary. It took impeachment articles to remind her of that, but at least the lesson landed
The race-discrimination claim died alongside the stay. “After Mullin, which included a constitutional race-discrimination claim, the Court cannot discern a path to concluding that Plaintiffs will succeed on the merits of this claim,” Burroughs wrote. This matters enormously — and not just for the Somali TPS case. The left’s strategy for blocking immigration enforcement has been to slap race-discrimination labels on every policy it dislikes, knowing that accusation alone can slow down enforcement for months or years in sympathetic courts. The Supreme Court’s Mullin decision closed that particular door, and Burroughs finally acknowledged it.
Ilhan Omar spent months railing against this outcome
Rep. Ogles had said it plainly when he filed the impeachment articles: “SCOTUS made it very clear that lower courts cannot suspend TPS. Yet, an Obama-appointed judge is defying the Court and the Constitution in an attempt to subvert the will of the President.” He was right. The timing of Burroughs’ reversal — coming shortly after the impeachment articles were formally introduced — suggests that the prospect of congressional accountability sharpened her legal analysis considerably. Whether that accountability mechanism is the right way to discipline wayward district court judges is a legitimate debate. What isn’t a debate is the result: the deportations can proceed. She called the enforcement racist. She wrote letters demanding answers. Now the Obama judge has confirmed that TPS holders have no protected legal interest in the continuation of their status — and that ending TPS doesn’t violate anyone’s due-process rights because terminating TPS simply makes former beneficiaries potentially subject to future immigration enforcement.
The law is the law. It applies to everyone. Even in Massachusetts. Even when Ilhan Omar doesn’t like it
