Following a series of victories at the U.S. Supreme Court, President Donald Trump and his administration are once again facing restrictive orders issued by several federal judges, curtailing the president’s immigration agenda.

In a Thursday hearing, Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District for Massachusetts, who was appointed by Barack Obama, indicated that she will issue a temporary stay against the president’s order stripping over 500,000 illegal immigrants of the temporary protected status (TPS) granted to them by the previous administration. Talwani claimed that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to revoke TPS given to the noncitizens effectively makes them now illegal immigrants and gives them a choice between “fleeing the country” or staying and “risk[ing] losing everything.”

“The nub of the problem here is that the [DHS] secretary, in cutting short the parole period afforded to these individuals, has to have a reasoned decision,” Talwani claimed, arguing that the Trump administration’s reason for ending the TPS program was “based on an incorrect reading of the law.” She added, “There was a deal and now that deal has been undercut.”

The Trump administration in February formally ended the TPS status of hundreds of thousands of those who came into the country illegally under the Biden administration but were shielded from immigration enforcement when given TPS. Noem said at the time, “President Trump and I are returning TPS to its original status: temporary.” DHS statistics suggest that over half a million Haitian immigrants who entered the country illegally and were granted TPS may still be in the U.S. However, the Trump administration is also stripping TPS awarded to Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.

Last week, Judge Edward Chen of the U.S. District Court for Northern California, another Obama appointee, issued an order barring the Trump administration from removing TPS from over 300,000 Venezuelan nationals. “The unprecedented action of vacating existing TPS (a step never taken by any previous administration in the 35 years of the TPS program), initiated just three days after Secretary Noem took office, reverses actions taken by the Biden administration to extend temporary protection of Venezuelan nationals that have been in place since 2021,” Chen wrote.

He continued that although Noem’s “actions appear predicated on negative stereotypes casting class-wide aspersions on their character (insinuating they were released from Venezuelan prisons and mental health facilities and imposed huge financial burdens on local communities),” illegal immigrants from Venezuela often hold bachelor’s degrees, mostly work full-time, and “annually contribute billions of dollars to the U.S. economy and pay hundreds of millions, if not billions, in social security taxes. They also have lower rates of criminality than the general U.S. population.”

The Trump administration’s plan to end TPS for Venezuelan nationals “threatens to: inflict irreparable harm on hundreds of thousands of persons whose lives, families, and livelihoods will be severely disrupted, cost the United States billions in economic activity, and injure public health and safety in communities throughout the United States,” Chen claimed. He further claimed that the administration “has failed to identify any real countervailing harm in continuing TPS for Venezuelan beneficiaries” and is “motivated by unconstitutional animus.” Thus, the judge announced that he would “postpone” the end of TPS “pending final adjudication of the merits of this case.”

Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in several cases related to immigration and deportation. In one instance, the Supreme Court vacated a district court’s temporary restraining order (TRO) preventing the president from carrying out deportations under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) of 1798. In another case, Chief Justice John Roberts blocked another district court’s demand that a Venezuelan national identified by the Trump administration as a foreign terrorist be returned to the U.S.

In the Supreme Court’s per curiam order regarding the president’s use of the AEA, the justices clarified that the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which the Venezuelan nationals being deported cited in an effort to halt their deportations, was not the correct means of challenging the president’s use of the AEA. In the cases being overseen currently by both Talwani and Chen, the complainants cite the APA, which bars the government from acting in a manner deemed “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law…”