A federal appeals court has sided with the Trump administration, allowing it to move ahead with ending temporary protections for more than 60,000 migrants from Central America and Nepal.
The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco granted an emergency stay of a lower court’s order that had kept Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations in place 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," the judges wrote.
The panel included appointees of former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
The decision means roughly 7,000 Nepalese whose protections expired August 5 are now subject to removal, while the TPS designations of about 51,000 Hondurans and 3,000 Nicaraguans will expire September 8.
TPS is a designation granted by the Homeland Security secretary that prevents deportation and allows recipients to work if conditions in their homelands are deemed unsafe.
Rights advocates say many of those affected have lived in the US for decades — Hondurans and Nicaraguans since 1998, when Hurricane Mitch devastated both countries, and Nepalese since the 2015 earthquake.
"The Trump administration is systematically de-documenting immigrants who have lived lawfully in this country for decades, raising US-citizen children, starting businesses, and contributing to their communities," Jessica Bansal, an attorney at the National Day Laborer Organization, said in a statement.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ended the designations after concluding that conditions no longer warranted protections.
In a July 31 ruling, US District Judge Trina L. Thompson temporarily blocked the move, saying the administration had failed to conduct an "objective review of country conditions," citing political violence in Honduras and ongoing natural disasters in Nicaragua.
The Trump administration argued that continuing TPS beyond emergencies effectively turned the program into "a de facto asylum system."
The administration has already ended TPS designations for more than 350,000 Venezuelans, 500,000 Haitians, 160,000 Ukrainians, and thousands from Afghanistan and Cameroon.
Many of those terminations remain tied up in litigation.
In May, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to terminate TPS for Venezuelans, declining to rule on underlying claims.
The next hearing in the Central America and Nepal case is scheduled for November 18.
