US judge blocks Trump administration from stripping immigrants of work permits
(Corrects which administration expanded TPS for three countries in paragraph 10)
By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, July 21 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from denying tens of thousands of asylum seekers and immigrants with Temporary Protected Status the 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 filed a lawsuit to block U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from enacting a set of policies designed to enforce new immigration restrictions enacted by Congress last year.
Gorton’s order will remain in effect until the Trump administration decides whether to put a longer-term pause on its policy. The judge said he would decide on this issue by August 5. USCIS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s signature tax and spending bill, passed by the Republican-led Congress in July 2025, imposed fees for the first time for people with Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, to apply for “asylum and limited work authorization.”
This is a designation that allows immigrants from countries affected by war, natural disasters or other disasters to live and work in the United States even if it is not safe for them to return to their home countries.
The Trump administration has sought to end TPS for people from more than a dozen countries as part of the Republican president’s hard-line immigration agenda. The US Supreme Court allowed this last month in the cases of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants.
In the lawsuit filed by the liberal legal group Democracy Forward, plaintiffs argued that USCIS is unlawfully enforcing the new law’s provisions and that its policies must be halted, particularly as they will lead to thousands of TPS holders from El Salvador, Sudan and Ukraine potentially losing their ability to work starting Wednesday.
These include policies that plaintiffs say inadvertently shortened the period during which TPS holders would be authorized to work by retroactively applying the new restrictions to people from El Salvador, Sudan and Ukraine.
Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement that Gorton’s decision ensured that thousands of families did not lose their livelihoods, while the courts evaluated whether the administration’s policies were legal.
Democratic former President Joe Biden’s administration expanded TPS for people from El Salvador, Sudan and Ukraine in January 2025. TPS will remain valid until September 9 for El Salvador and until October 19 for Sudan and Ukraine.
The plaintiffs argued that the new USCIS policies were invalid because the public was given no notice or opportunity to comment before the policies were adopted, as required by the Administrative Procedure Act, and because the 2025 law retroactively applied the TPS work permit provisions without statutory authorization.
On Tuesday, Gorton declined to stop USCIS from collecting the fee for now, but said the agency cannot strip work permits or impose other penalties on people who don’t pay the fee.
The case was filed in Boston, a popular destination for plaintiffs challenging Trump’s agenda, and appeared before one of the few judges on the court not appointed by Gorton, a Democrat appointed by Republican President George H. W. Bush.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston and Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
