Judge Bars Trump Admin Deportation Plan for 3,600 Myanmar Migrants

(MENAFN) A US federal judge has halted the Trump administration's effort to strip deportation protections from more than 3,600 Myanmar migrants currently residing in the United States, local media outlets reported.

Judge Matthew Kennelly, presiding in Illinois, delivered a 57-page ruling declaring that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's move to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Myanmar nationals inadequately assessed the crisis conditions plaguing Myanmar, where protracted ethnic warfare has triggered mass violence and population displacement spanning years.

Kennelly noted that while Noem justified the termination by asserting Myanmar's conditions had sufficiently stabilized to permit deportations, other Trump administration officials documented "violence against civilians including airstrikes, shelling, and razing of villages, human trafficking, and dire humanitarian need" throughout the conflict-ravaged nation.

The protected status was more plausibly revoked to further Noem's "broader goal of curtailing immigration and eliminating T.P.S. generally, not on her evaluation of changed conditions in Burma," the judge reasoned, employing the country's former designation.

Following a military takeover in 2021, the Southeast Asian nation of more than 54 million has endured devastating ethnic conflict involving militant factions and government forces, claiming thousands of lives and displacing upward of 3.5 million residents.

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