President Trump just picked up an immigration victory from a federal appeals panel almost nobody on the Left can dismiss as a collection of MAGA judges.

The decision was unanimous.

Two of the three judges were appointed by Joe Biden.

And together, they reversed a pair of lower-court orders that had kept the Trump administration from ending Temporary Protected Status for migrants from South Sudan and Ethiopia.

That is a much bigger development than the dry legal language makes it sound.

The panel was made up of Judges Julie Rikelman, Seth Aframe, and Joshua Dunlap.

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Rikelman and Aframe are Biden appointees. Dunlap was appointed by President Trump.

All three agreed that the district courts could not keep the TPS terminations frozen on the legal theories presented in these cases.

The First Circuit’s official South Sudan judgment reverses an order that postponed Homeland Security’s termination of that country’s TPS designation. The appellate court said the lower court had based its intervention entirely on nonconstitutional claims that federal law does not permit courts to review.

It also directed the clerk to issue the mandate “forthwith,” language that moves the case back down without the usual delay.

That does not mean every South Sudanese TPS holder is instantly removed from the country. Some may have another legal status, a pending asylum claim, or a different individual basis for remaining in the United States.

But the broad court order that stopped DHS from ending this particular temporary program is gone.

The ruling restores the administration’s authority to carry out the termination decision instead of leaving an executive-branch immigration judgment trapped under an indefinite judicial pause.

The First Circuit’s Ethiopia judgment reaches the same conclusion and identifies the same statutory barrier to the lawsuit. A district court had postponed Homeland Security’s termination of Ethiopia’s TPS designation while litigation moved forward, extending protections beyond the administration’s chosen end date.

The appeals panel reversed because the claims supporting that order were also nonconstitutional challenges to a decision Congress shielded from judicial review.

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The two judgments are short because the controlling question had already been answered by the Supreme Court only weeks earlier.

Neither panel decision says courts have no role whenever the government acts unlawfully. Constitutional claims remain a different category, and individual migrants can still pursue whatever separate rights the law gives them.

But a judge cannot simply relabel disagreement with a TPS termination and then seize control of a power Congress placed with the executive branch.

In practical terms, the panel removed the injunction that had preserved Ethiopia’s designation past the administration’s chosen end date. The challengers lost the legal foundation for keeping that nationwide policy decision suspended.

Both reversals landed within the same hour:

The foundation for these rulings is the Supreme Court’s June decision in Mullin v. Doe. In that case, the justices examined a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act stating that TPS designation and termination determinations are not subject to judicial review.

The Court held that the bar covers nonconstitutional challenges to those decisions, including claims brought under the Administrative Procedure Act.

That ruling changed the legal terrain under both First Circuit cases.

The district-court orders depended on the very kind of claims the Supreme Court had just said could not support judicial review. Once that happened, the appellate outcome became difficult to avoid, regardless of which president appointed the judges considering the appeals.

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It is a clean example of how one Supreme Court ruling can dismantle multiple lower-court roadblocks at once.

The judicial biographies maintained by the Federal Judicial Center make the panel’s composition especially notable in a case carrying obvious political stakes. Rikelman joined the First Circuit after Biden nominated her in 2022 and the Senate confirmed her the following year.

Aframe reached the same court through a Biden nomination in 2024 after serving as an assistant United States attorney in New Hampshire. Dunlap, the panel’s Trump appointee, was confirmed after being nominated in 2025.

Those biographies do not make the result legally stronger; a judgment stands on its reasoning, not the party of the appointing president.

Politically, however, they close off an easy excuse that this was simply a partisan panel built to rubber-stamp the administration.

This was not a 2-1 ideological split. It was a three-judge panel applying the Supreme Court’s command to two disputes with the same central defect.

Every judge signed onto both outcomes, and neither judgment contains a dissent. The panel treated the statutory review bar as binding law rather than an invitation to preserve the lower courts’ preferred policy result.

That unanimity also makes the result harder to portray as a partisan anomaly. The administration won because the panel agreed on the limit Congress wrote into the TPS statute.

There is one important timing distinction in the Ethiopia case.

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Geidner’s current legal reporting notes that a brief administrative pause still protects the Ethiopia plaintiffs while the appellate mandate returns to the district court. That is a narrow procedural cushion for the transition between courts, not a revival of the postponement order the First Circuit reversed on the merits.

Barring a new intervention from a higher court, the underlying TPS termination is positioned to take effect once that short window closes in the ordinary course.

South Sudan is further along because the panel ordered its mandate issued immediately instead of waiting through the standard appellate timetable.

The distinction matters. The administration won both appeals, but “won” should not be confused with every practical consequence occurring at the same second.

The legal barriers fell. Implementation now follows the specific procedural posture of each case.

The South Sudan judgment expressly accelerates that process by ordering the mandate at once. Ethiopia’s remaining pause is administrative and measured in days, while the judgment on the merits has already gone against the challengers.

That sequence leaves room for ordinary emergency applications, but it does not change what the First Circuit decided. The district court’s TPS postponement no longer has appellate support.

Homeland Security has been blunt about the larger policy behind these fights:

TPS was created to give eligible nationals temporary refuge when war, disaster, or other extraordinary conditions make returning home unsafe.

It can be renewed when those conditions continue. It can also be terminated when the secretary of Homeland Security determines that a country no longer meets the statutory requirements.

That temporary character is the heart of the administration’s argument.

A program that can be extended but can never realistically be ended is no longer temporary. And if every termination can be stalled for years by a nationwide court order, the elected executive branch no longer controls the authority Congress assigned to it.

The First Circuit did not endorse every immigration choice President Trump will make. It delivered a narrower ruling with a powerful consequence: judges cannot use claims Congress barred from review to keep these TPS designations alive.

For the administration, that is two more courtroom roadblocks removed.

For the wider immigration battle, it is a warning that the familiar strategy of racing to a friendly courtroom may be losing its power when the statute—and now the Supreme Court—says the decision belongs elsewhere.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

 

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