9th Circuit Hands Trump Administration a Big Win With TPS Ruling – RedState
The Trump administration scored another big victory at the appeals court level Monday, when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals stayed a lower court’s ruling overturning Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations for Nepal, Honduras and Nicaragua.
A victory for the rule of law and a vindication of the American Constitution. Under the previous administration, Temporary Protected Status was abused to allow violent terrorists, criminals, and national security threats to enter our country.
TPS was never intended to be permanent, and yet… pic.twitter.com/SZhVNuhU1n
– Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) February 9, 2026
Several TPS cases are currently being litigated, and it’s a bit difficult to keep them all consistent, but this one, as noted, involves TPS designations for Nepal, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Second. Noem terminated the TPS designations for all three countries in the summer of 2025. Plaintiffs sued to block this termination, and in late December, District Judge Trina Thompson (Northern District of California) determined that Noem’s decisions violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and entered a judgment vacating the terminations.
The administration appealed, and with Monday’s ruling (seen below), the 9th Circuit not only granted a stay pending appeal, but struck at the very heart of a number of related decisions:
We conclude that the government is likely to succeed on the merits of its appeal, either by demonstrating that the district court lacked jurisdiction or by prevailing on plaintiffs’ arbitrary and capricious challenge to the APA.
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Shocking. Ninth Circuit crushes left-wing judge’s unbalanced opinion
The court distinguished this case, involving the termination of TPS, since its recent decision in a case involving the vacation of a TPS designation, which concluded that it had exceeded its statutory powers. Simply put, according to the 9th Circuit, applicable law allows the DHS Secretary to terminate TPS designations, but not to rescind them.
The court also found it likely that the administration would succeed on the merits of the APA’s request, although one of the panel’s judges (Michael Hawkins, a Clinton appointee) found it unnecessary to address the merits of the APA’s request, although he agreed with the decision to grant the stay. (The other two judges on the panel, Consuello Callahan and Eric Miller, were appointed by Bush 43 and Trump, respectively.)
It is worth noting that the court also pointed to recent stays issued by the Supreme Court in related cases to support its decision:
We are not writing on a blank page, however, because the Supreme Court has twice stayed a district court’s orders blocking the vacatur of Venezuela’s TPS secretary. See Noem v. National GST All., 146 S.Ct. 23 (2025); Noem v. National GST All.145 S.Ct. 2728 (2025). These orders did not contain any reasoning, so they do not inform our analysis of the legal issues in this case and, in any event, the issues are not identical. But the stay requests involved similar assertions of prejudice on the part of both parties, and we were warned that the Court’s stay orders must state “how [we] should exercise [our] equitable discretion in similar cases. Trump versus Boyle145 S.Ct. 2653, 2654 (2025). We therefore conclude that equitable factors favor a suspension.
The plaintiffs, of course, can request a rehearing en banc, and there may be an appeal to the Supreme Court, but if they’re counting on a SCOTUS victory, they may be out of luck.
SPT Decision 2-9-26 by Susie Moore
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