The Daily Fuckup

A federal judge in Massachusetts once again put the brakes on the Trump administration’s effort to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopians, extending the legal shield that had been under threat since the Department of Homeland Security moved to end the designation. The ruling means that more than 5,000 Ethiopians in the United States will keep living and working under TPS while the lawsuit continues. The decision also underscored that this was not just a policy preference fight, but a statutory one: the court found a serious question about whether the administration followed the consultation process Congress wrote into the TPS law. In practical terms, the administration’s deportation timetable hit a wall, again. The message from the bench was not subtle: if the White House wants to unwind humanitarian protections, it still has to obey the law while doing it.