“Hundreds of Somalis Deported” — Minnesota Somalis Panic as Judge Rules Deportations Move Forward

On August 14, 2026, a federal judge in Boston cleared the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals, closing out a legal fight that had run for nearly nine months. U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs lifted the stay she had issued in a case brought by Somali TPS holders, writing that the Supreme Court's June 25 decision in Mullin v. Doe left her bound to view the dispute "through the Mullin prism" — even as she found that the plaintiffs had made a convincing showing they would suffer irreparable harm. In this breakdown, we trace how a protection first granted in 1991 was dismantled: from the administration's January termination notice, through the Twin Cities enforcement surge that followed, to a ruling in which the judge effectively conceded the outcome was decided above her. The deeper story is about scale and about the collapse of judicial review. USCIS has put the number of Somali nationals holding TPS at 2,471, with roughly 1,383 more applications pending, while other reporting places the affected population closer to 1,100 — a fraction of Minnesota's Somali community, which numbers in the tens of thousands and is overwhelmingly made up of citizens and permanent residents. We examine the gap between that figure and the political conflict built around it: Rep. Ilhan Omar's December 2025 letters demanding answers on Operation Metro Surge and the TPS threat, the administration's arrest tallies, and what it means that courts have now allowed similar terminations for other countries. When the statute forecloses review, policy stops being litigated and becomes purely a question of who holds the office. Turn on notifications to stay updated! 🔔🔔🔔