A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration from stripping legal protections from more than 2,800 Yemeni nationals, keeping the Temporary Protected Status program in place while a lawsuit moves forward.
U.S. District Judge Dale Ho in New York ruled for 16 Yemeni nationals who either already have TPS or are applying for it, saying the government likely violated the law when it tried to end the protection without following the review process Congress required. The decision means the program will remain in force beyond May 4, the date it had been set to end, when Yemeni immigrants authorized to live and work in the United States would have had 60 days to leave or face arrest and deportation.
Ho said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had “acted unlawfully by terminating TPS in clear disregard of the procedural requirements established by Congress.” He added that TPS holders from Yemen are not “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” but “ordinary, law-abiding people” who were granted status because the government repeatedly determined that Yemen was in armed conflict and that sending them back would pose a serious threat to their safety. He also said the determination can change, but Congress set a process for that review and the secretary did not follow it.
The ruling lands in the middle of a fight over one of the administration’s broadest immigration moves. In February 2025, Noem announced that TPS for Yemen would end. A month later, the Department of Homeland Security said in a federal notice that even though Yemen still faced “extraordinary and temporary conditions,” ending the designation was required because it was contrary to the national interest to let Yemeni nationals remain temporarily in the United States. The Trump administration has revoked TPS for Yemen as one of 13 countries, and the Supreme Court is separately weighing the administration’s effort to roll back protections for Syria and Haiti.
Yemen has had TPS since 2015, when it was first designated during the Obama administration because of an ongoing armed conflict. The protections were renewed several times, including during the first Trump administration, and the most recent redesignation came in 2024 amid an ongoing civil war and humanitarian crises. The State Department still lists Yemen under a Level 4 travel advisory, warning Americans not to go because of terrorism, unrest, crime, health risks, kidnapping and landmines.
That backdrop matters because TPS was created by Congress in 1990 to give the executive branch a way to protect foreign nationals when conditions at home make return unsafe. Ho’s order does not end the administration’s effort to unwind the program, but it does force the government to keep the protections alive while the case is litigated — and it signals that any attempt to shut them down will have to follow the statute Congress wrote, not a faster political timetable.
The question now is how far the administration is willing to push the case while the protections stay intact for Yemeni families who had been preparing for an April deadline that no longer exists.