‘Activist’ Judge Who Attempted To Overrule The Supreme Court Judge Faces Impeachment Effort

This past January, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem published a notice terminating the TPS designation for Somalia, effective March 17, 2026. Plaintiffs, including advocacy groups and individuals, filed suit in the District of Massachusetts challenging the termination. Burroughs initially entered an administrative stay of the termination’s effective date while the case proceeded almost immediately after Noem’s order was handed down.

On June 25, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 opinion that the judicial-review bar in the TPS statute precludes non-constitutional claims challenging terminations. The decision reversed lower-court stays that had postponed terminations for Haiti and Syria and remanded those matters. Constitutional claims remain theoretically available, though the Court found the equal-protection argument presented in the Haiti litigation unlikely to succeed.

Days before Judge Burroughs’ latest action, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed comparable administrative stays issued by other district judges that had delayed TPS terminations for Ethiopia and South Sudan, applying the framework set out in the prior case, Mullin v. Doe. Then, on July 30, the plaintiffs in the Somalia case filed an amended complaint and an emergency motion.

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The amended pleading centered on Fifth Amendment claims, asserting that the termination violated due-process requirements because the decision had been predetermined and that it violated equal-protection guarantees by discriminating on the basis of race and national origin. The plaintiffs pointed to public statements by President Trump concerning Somali immigrants as evidence of the alleged motivations.

A day later, Judge Burroughs issued a fresh administrative stay. The order continued to prevent the termination of Somalia’s TPS designation from taking effect, declaring the termination void for the time being while the court considered whether any of the claims in the amended complaint could support longer-term relief. The stay applies to approximately 1,100 individuals holding TPS based on the Somalia designation.

Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival sharply criticized the ruling in a social media post. “Judge Allison Burroughs just entered yet another order preventing the termination of Somalia TPS. There is no serious debate about what is going on in these cases—defiance, obstruction, and delay,” he wrote.

Because the Supreme Court has already addressed the statutory bar on judicial review of non-constitutional challenges to TPS terminations, and because parallel stays in other circuits have been reversed on the strength of that precedent, the district court’s continued administrative stay may be interpreted as an effort to maintain judicial intervention in a field where the highest court has already defined the limited scope of review and where the core reviewability questions have been litigated.

In response to the move, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) announced plans to file articles of impeachment against the Obama-appointed judge. “On Monday I will file Articles of Impeachment against Judge Allison Burroughs for her unconstitutional act of Judicial Activism!!! Enough is enough, Americans First NOT 3rd world migrants,” the congressman posted on X.

Ogles has previously introduced or cosponsored impeachment resolutions directed at other federal judges whose rulings conflicted with administration policies. Under the Constitution, removal of a federal judge requires a majority vote of the House of Representatives to impeach followed by a two-thirds vote of the Senate to convict. Such proceedings remain rare