US judge blocks Trump administration from stripping immigrants of work permits

BOSTON, July 21 - A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump's administration from stripping tens of thousands of asylum seekers and immigrants who have Temporary Protected Status of their ability to work in the United States.

U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton in Boston sided with a coalition of immigrant rights groups and labor unions that sued to block U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from moving forward with a series of policies designed to implement new immigration-related restrictions enacted by Congress last year.

Gorton's order will be in place until he decides whether to issue a longer-term pause of the Trump administration's policy. The judge said he would rule on that by August 5. USCIS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump's signature tax and spending law that was passed by the Republican-led Congress in July 2025 for the first time imposed fees to apply for asylum and restricted employment authorization for people with Temporary Protected Status, or TPS.

That is a designation that lets migrants from countries stricken by war, natural disaster or other catastrophes live and work in the United States while it is unsafe for them to return to their home countries.

The Trump administration has sought as part of the Republican president's hardline immigration agenda to end TPS for people from more than a dozen countries. The U.S. Supreme Court last month allowed it to do so in the case of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants.

The plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by the liberal legal group Democracy Forward argued that USCIS had unlawfully implemented the new law's provisions and that its policies needed to be halted, particularly one that would lead to thousands of TPS holders from El Salvador, Sudan and Ukraine potentially losing their ability to work starting on Wednesday.

Among those policies are ones that the plaintiffs say wrongly cut short the time TPS holders would be authorized to work by retroactively applying the new restrictions to people from El Salvador, Sudan and Ukraine.

Skye Perryman, Democracy Forward's president and CEO, said in a statement that Gorton's ruling ensures that thousands of families will not lose their livelihoods while courts consider whether the administration's policies are legal.

While the administration has been terminating TPS for other countries, it extended TPS for people from those three nations in January. TPS remains valid for El Salvador through September 9 and for Sudan and Ukraine through October 19.

The plaintiffs argued the new USCIS policies were invalid because the public never received notice and a chance to comment on them before they were adopted, as required by the Administrative Procedure Act, and applied the 2025 law's TPS work authorization provisions retroactively without statutory authorization.

Gorton on Tuesday declined to block USCIS from collecting the fee for now, but said the agency cannot strip people who fail to pay it of work permits or impose other penalties.

The case was filed in Boston, a venue popular among litigants challenging Trump's agenda, and landed before one of the few judges on the court who was not appointed by a Democrat, Gorton, an appointee of Republican President George H.W. Bush. REUTERS