A Tennessee congressman filed articles of impeachment against a federal judge appointed by Barack Obama, accusing her of defying the Supreme Court by blocking the Trump administration from ending Temporary Protected Status for Somalis.
Rep. Andy Ogles moved to impeach U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs after she issued a stay on Friday that temporarily prevents the administration from terminating TPS, a humanitarian program that shields foreign nationals who fled war or natural disasters in their home countries, for Somali recipients. The stay came down weeks after the Supreme Court's ruling in Mullin v. Doe, handed down in June, which significantly curbed lower courts' ability to block executive TPS decisions.
Ogles, a Republican representing Tennessee, framed the stay as a direct act of judicial defiance. His impeachment resolution, first obtained by Fox News Digital, accused Burroughs of having "defied the authority of both Federal law and the Supreme Court."
The impeachment resolution lays out a pointed charge: that Burroughs engineered a workaround to the high court's decision. The resolution states:
"In issuing this stay, Judge Burroughs attempted to get around the Supreme Court's ruling in Mullin v. Doe by entertaining spurious allegations of racial and national-origin discrimination against an Administration that has chosen to not renew a single temporary protected status designation."
The stay arose from an ongoing lawsuit filed by African Communities Together, a plaintiff organization that argues the Trump administration's decision to end TPS for Somalis was rooted in racial and national-origin discrimination. After the Supreme Court narrowed lower courts' authority over TPS disputes in June, the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint adding those discrimination allegations, a legal maneuver Ogles characterized as a pretext to keep the injunction alive.
Burroughs, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, was appointed to the bench in 2014 by then-President Obama. Fox News Digital reached out to the Massachusetts district court for comment earlier Monday but did not report receiving a response.
Ogles told Just The News that the Supreme Court "made it very clear that lower courts cannot suspend TPS," adding that "an Obama-appointed judge is defying the Court and the Constitution in an attempt to subvert the will of the President."
He did not leave room for ambiguity about the remedy he wants:
"This judicial activist's obstruction of the people's will must be stopped. Judge Burroughs must be impeached."
Ogles is not the only administration ally raising the alarm. DHS General Counsel James Percival posted on X the same Friday the stay was issued, taking aim at a pattern he described in blunt terms.
"There is no serious debate about what is going on in these cases, defiance, obstruction, and delay."
Percival's criticism pointed beyond Burroughs alone. Fox News Digital's reporting described a group of federal district judges, not the judiciary as a whole, who have repeatedly blocked deportations and TPS rollbacks, prompting the administration to publicly name what it views as coordinated resistance from the bench.
The framing from DHS is deliberate. By casting these stays as acts of open defiance rather than routine judicial review, administration officials are building a public case that a subset of lower-court judges is substituting its own policy preferences for settled law, even after the Supreme Court moved to limit exactly that kind of intervention.
Ogles' resolution arrives with a cautionary precedent. A previous impeachment effort targeting Judge James Boasberg fell flat after senior House Republicans argued it was not the most effective way to rein in judges they described as "rogue." That failure raised questions about whether GOP leadership has the appetite for impeachment as a tool of judicial accountability, or whether such resolutions serve mainly as messaging vehicles.
Still, Fox News Digital reported earlier this year that conservatives planned to revive their campaign to remove judges they describe as activists from the bench. Ogles' filing against Burroughs is the most concrete step in that renewed effort so far.
Whether the resolution advances beyond introduction remains an open question. Impeachment requires a simple majority in the House, followed by a two-thirds vote to convict in the Senate, a threshold that has historically made judicial impeachment rare and difficult. But the political utility of the resolution extends beyond its procedural odds. Each filing forces a public conversation about the boundaries of judicial power, particularly on immigration, where lower courts have repeatedly inserted themselves between the executive branch and its enforcement priorities.
Temporary Protected Status was designed as a narrow humanitarian measure, a way to shelter foreign nationals whose home countries were convulsed by war, earthquakes, or other emergencies. Over time, TPS designations have been renewed for years or even decades, effectively converting temporary protections into semi-permanent residency for hundreds of thousands of people.
The Trump administration has moved to end TPS designations broadly. Ogles' impeachment resolution noted that the administration "has chosen to not renew a single temporary protected status designation", a fact that undercuts the plaintiffs' claim of racial targeting, in Ogles' view, by showing the policy applies across the board regardless of the recipients' national origin.
That argument will face scrutiny. African Communities Together's amended complaint specifically alleges racial and national-origin discrimination in the Somali TPS termination, and Burroughs found enough merit in those claims to issue the stay. But the broader pattern, an administration ending TPS for all designated groups, not singling out one, is the factual backdrop against which the discrimination allegation will be tested.
The Supreme Court's Mullin v. Doe ruling in June was supposed to settle the question of whether district judges could keep blocking TPS terminations. By significantly curbing that power, the court signaled that these decisions belong to the executive branch, not to individual judges. Burroughs' stay, issued just weeks later on the basis of a newly amended complaint, is precisely the kind of maneuver that critics argue renders Supreme Court rulings meaningless in practice.
For the Somali TPS recipients caught in the middle, the legal uncertainty continues. The stay keeps their protections in place for now, but the underlying lawsuit, the impeachment resolution, and the administration's determination to end the program guarantee that the fight is far from settled.
When the Supreme Court draws a line and a lower-court judge immediately finds a way around it, the question stops being about immigration policy and starts being about whether the judiciary's own chain of command means anything at all.
