The guillotine is paused. On Tuesday, a federal judge in Boston threw a temporary wrench into the Trump administration’s aggressive push to strip work permits from tens of thousands of asylum seekers and immigrants living under Temporary Protected Status.
U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton, a George H.W. Bush appointee, sided with a coalition of labor unions and immigrant advocacy groups. They sued to stop U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from executing a suite of harsh new rules. These rules were designed to enforce immigration crackdowns passed by Congress last year.
Gorton’s freeze is temporary. He promised a final ruling on a longer-term injunction by August 5. USCIS stayed silent when asked for comment. They usually do.
The chaos stems from Trump’s signature tax and spending package, rammed through by a Republican Congress in July 2025. For the first time, the law slapped fees on asylum applications and choked off work access for those under TPS.
TPS is a lifeline. It lets people fleeing war zones and natural disasters survive legally in America. The Trump administration wants it dead. They have targeted the program for over a dozen countries, scoring a win last month when the Supreme Court let them axe protections for Haitian and Syrian migrants.
But the latest fight is about timing and bureaucracy. Democracy Forward, the liberal legal group behind the suit, argued USCIS jumped the gun. The agency’s retroactive rules would have stripped work eligibility from Salvadoran, Sudanese, and Ukrainian migrants starting Wednesday.
It was a bureaucratic ambush. The plaintiffs argued the government bypassed the mandatory public notice and comment periods required by federal law. They also argued the agency had no right to apply the 2025 law retroactively.
Gorton didn’t block the new fees. Not yet. But he ruled that USCIS cannot punish migrants or yank their work permits if they cannot pay.
The Biden administration had previously extended TPS for El Salvador through September 9, and for Sudan and Ukraine through October 19. Now, those families have a brief reprieve. “This keeps people working,” said Skye Perryman, head of Democracy Forward. For now, the paychecks keep coming.
Filing in Boston is a favorite tactic for anti-Trump litigants. Usually, they get a friendly Democratic appointee. This time, they got Gorton. He didn’t give them everything, but he gave them time. In the immigration wars, time is everything.
