A federal appeals court on Wednesday sided with the Trump administration and halted for now a lower court’s order that had kept in place temporary protections for 60,000 migrants from Central America and Nepal.
This means that the Republican administration can move toward removing an estimated 7,000 people from Nepal whose Temporary Protected Status designations expired Aug. 5, meaning they instantly lose status and become undocumented. The TPS designations and legal status of 51,000 Hondurans and 3,000 Nicaraguans are set to expire Sept. 8, at which point they will become eligible for removal.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco granted the emergency stay pending an appeal as immigrants rights advocates allege that the administration acted unlawfully in ending Temporary Protected Status designations for people from Honduras, Nicaragua and Nepal.
“The district court’s order granting plaintiffs’ motion to postpone, entered July 31, 2025, is stayed pending further order of this court,” wrote the judges, who are appointees of Democrat Bill Clinton and Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
Temporary Protected Status is a designation that can be granted by the Homeland Security secretary, preventing migrants from being deported and allowing them to work. The Trump administration has aggressively sought to remove the protection, thus making more people eligible for removal. It’s part of a wider effort by the administration to carry out mass deportations of immigrants.
Secretary Kristi Noem can extend Temporary Protected Status to immigrants in the U.S. if conditions in their homelands are deemed unsafe for return due to a natural disaster, political instability or other dangerous conditions.
Immigrants rights advocates say TPS holders from Nepal have lived in the United States for more than a decade while people from Honduras and Nicaragua have lived in the country for 26 years, after Hurricane Mitch devastated both countries in 1998.
Sijan, 29, moved to the United States from Nepal as an international student in 2014. He gained Temporary Protected Status after an earthquake hit Nepal the next year.
“I feel pretty much disappointment. I feel like the justice system has failed a community of over 60,000 people,” he told GBH News in a Wednesday night interview.
Sijan said he works in the biopharmaceutical and manufacturing industries and is worried about the impact losing his work permit will have.
“A significant part of our income depends upon my income here, so yeah, it would directly affect us,” he said of supporting family in Nepal.
GBH News agreed not to use his last name due to his fears of being detained and deported.
“We will not stop organizing and fighting for the right to stay in the only home many of us have ever known,” Doris Landaverde, coordinator of Massachusetts TPS Committee, wrote in an email. “We will keep fighting for permanent protections and to stop the cruel separation of our families.”
It is unclear when advocates will file with the Supreme Court, but sources interviewed for this story said it will likely happen soon.
Noem ended the programs after determining that conditions no longer warranted protections.
In a sharply written July 31 order, U.S. District Judge Trina L. Thompson in San Francisco kept the protections in place while the case proceeds. The next hearing is Nov. 18.
She said the administration ended the migrant status protections without an “objective review of the country conditions,” such as political violence in Honduras and the impact of recent hurricanes and storms in Nicaragua.
Thompson postponed the termination of the TPS program for Nepal, Nicaragua and Honduras until mid November. Four days later, the government appealed to the Ninth Circuit.
In response, Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary at DHS, said, “TPS was never meant to be a de facto asylum system, yet that is how previous administrations have used it for decades.”
Patricia lives in Massachusetts and is a single mother from Honduras with a U.S. citizen daughter. She left Honduras after Hurricane Mitch.
“Everybody lost everything, houses, animals, everything,” she said. Since 1998, she’s lived and worked legally in the United States under Temporary Protected Status, hoping there would eventually be a way to get a green card. GBH News agreed to only use her first name due to her fears of being deported.
Now Patricia is terrified she’ll lose her job in September and be unable to pay her $2,000 monthly rent. Her 11-year-old daughter Camila is about to start school again, and Patricia is worried about what would happen if she loses status and is detained.
“It would be like, traumatized for my daughter coming home and not seeing nobody. Ever since the first [Trump] administration she has always like, ‘Mom, Are you home? Are you OK? Are you done with work?’ Things like that. She’s always been like that because she understands — in her own way, she understands exactly what is going on,” Patricia said.
The Trump administration has already terminated TPS designations for about 350,000 Venezuelans, 500,000 Haitians, more than 160,000 Ukrainians and thousands of people from Afghanistan and Cameroon. Some have pending lawsuits in federal courts.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that Noem’s decisions are unlawful because they were predetermined by President Donald Trump’s campaign promises and motivated by racial animus.
But Drew Ensign, a U.S. deputy assistant attorney general, said at a hearing Tuesday that the government suffers an ongoing irreparable harm from its “inability to carry out the programs that it has determined are warranted.”
In May, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end TPS designations for Venezuelans. The justices provided no rationale, which is common in emergency appeals, and did not rule on the underlying claims.
