MANHATTAN (CN) - A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration from ending temporary protected status for Yemeni nationals - just three days before its termination was set to take effect next week.

In a scathing 36-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Dale Ho found that there was no meaningful difference between the government's bid to end TPS for people from Yemen and its unsuccessful attempts to do the same for other countries.

"The court does not write on a blank slate," the Joe Biden appointee wrote. "Defendants have terminated TPS for more than half a dozen countries in the past six months, under circumstances nearly indistinguishable from those here. And every district court that has considered the principle argument raised by the plaintiffs here has granted a motion to postpone and/or vacate a termination of TPS for failing to comply with the requisite procedures for doing so established by Congress." 

In this case, the government made no arguments that its determination to terminate TPS for Yemen was based on a different rationale, Ho ruled.

"Instead, it simply regurgitates the same arguments that these courts, as well as a motions panel of the Second Circuit, have uniformly rejected," he found.

The ruling protects the TPS of roughly 3,000 people from Yemen living in the United States. Ho sided with a group of those individuals who sued the Department of Homeland Security over its decision to strip them of those protections, finding that many of them would have lost access to life-saving medical care and been separated from their families if it had been allowed to stand. 

Without the judge's intervention, their TPS status would have expired on May 4.

"TPS holders from Yemen are not 'killers, leeches and entitlement junkies,'" Ho wrote at the end of his ruling, quoting language from then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem when describing travel bans from certain countries. "They are ordinary, law-abiding people who have been granted status to be here because the government has repeatedly determined, in accordance with the TPS statute, that Yemen is subject to an ongoing armed conflict, and that, due to that conflict, requiring them to return would pose a serious threat to their safety."

He added that TPS determination is subject to periodic review and can be changed, but DHS failed to adhere to the proper procedure for that review, established by Congress.

In a statement to Courthouse News, a spokesperson for DHS said, "Temporary means temporary and the final word will not be from activist judges legislating from the bench."

Ho's ruling came just days after the U.S. Supreme Court took up the government's appeal of similar rulings that blocked it from ending TPS protections for more than 350,000 Haitians and more than 6,000 Syrians. Considering the high court's conservative supermajority, it remains very possible that it will eventually greenlight those TPS terminations after all.

Ho acknowledged such a possibility in his ruling Friday, but also noted time is of the essence. 

"Ordinarily, this court might wait for the Supreme Court's guidance before ruling on this case, but given the imminent termination of TPS for Yemen in three days - and the consequent loss of legal status for approximately 3,000 people - the exigencies of the moment require a ruling on plaintiffs' motions," he ruled. 

TPS offers migrants from certain countries work authorization and protects them against deportation, should they face perilous conditions in their home nations. The designations are temporary, meaning DHS regularly reviews them and may extend or revoke them based on the conditions in each country.

Yemen was first designated for TPS in 2015 due to its ongoing civil war. But Noem announced in February that it was terminating that status, pursuant to the administration "prioritizing our national security interests and putting America first." 

"After reviewing conditions in the country and consulting with appropriate U.S. government agencies, I determined that Yemen no longer meets the law's requirements to be designated for temporary protected status," Noem said in a statement on Feb. 13. "Allowing TPS Yemen beneficiaries to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to our national interest. TPS was designed to be temporary, and this administration is returning TPS to its original temporary intent."

The Trump administration has sought to terminate TPS protections for 13 countries in total, in efforts that have largely been rejected by courts around the country.

Source: Courthouse News Service