U.S. District Judge Allison Dale Burroughs, an Obama appointee sitting in Boston, lifted a stay on President Trump's deportation flights to Somalia on August 16. The judge who was supposed to be the resistance's last firewall in New England just opened the door and held it.

Turns out even Obama's judges read Supreme Court opinions.

Judge Burroughs acknowledged she was "bound … to view things through the Mullin prism" — referring to the Supreme Court's June ruling in Mullin v. Doe, which sharply limited how much federal judges can second-guess the executive branch on Temporary Protected Status terminations.

2,471 Somali nationals currently hold TPS status, with another 1,383 applications pending. Somalia is one of four African countries — along with Cameroon, Ethiopia, and South Sudan — losing TPS protections as part of the administration's termination of the program across 13 countries total. The program was created in 1990 as a temporary measure. Thirty-six years of "temporary" is a word doing a lot of heavy lifting.

The administration announced the TPS termination plan back in January. The usual playbook kicked in immediately — lawsuits in friendly jurisdictions, emergency motions, breathless press conferences about families being torn apart. It worked for years under the first Trump term. Judges in Hawaii and Maryland and Northern California would issue nationwide injunctions before the ink dried on any executive action.

Then came Mullin v. Doe. The Supreme Court's June ruling didn't just decide one case — it redrew the boundaries of judicial review on immigration enforcement. Lower court judges who wanted to play immigration czar from the bench suddenly found themselves without the legal tools to do it. Judge Burroughs is the proof of concept.

The open-borders legal establishment will frame this as one judge "reluctantly" following precedent. That framing misses the point. The significance isn't that Burroughs personally wanted deportation flights to Somalia. It's that the legal resistance model — file in a friendly court, get an Obama or Biden judge, secure a nationwide injunction, run out the clock — has a fatal new vulnerability. When even the judges who sympathize with your cause tell you the Supreme Court won't let them help, the strategy is dead.

The deportation flights aren't just continuing. They're now judge-proof.