DHS Secretary Noem terminated Nepal TPS designation, stripping ~12,700 earthquake refugees of immigration protection

On June 6, 2025, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem published a notice in the Federal Register terminating the Temporary Protected Status designation for Nepal, effective August 5, 2025. Nepal had held TPS continuously since June 24, 2015, when the Obama administration designated it following the catastrophic April 2015 earthquake that killed more than 8,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands. The termination notice affected approximately 12,700 Nepali nationals then holding TPS, of whom roughly 5,500 had since become lawful permanent residents and would not be affected by the termination.

Secretary Noem's Federal Register notice stated that country conditions in Nepal no longer met the statutory threshold for TPS, citing earthquake recovery and reconstruction in the decade since the disaster. The Temporary Protected Status statute (8 U.S.C. § 1254a) authorizes the DHS Secretary to terminate a designation when conditions that prompted it have sufficiently improved. The determination is meant to be a good-faith assessment of whether return is safe and feasible for the affected nationals.

A federal district court later vacated the termination, ruling it "arbitrary, capricious, and motivated by racial animus," though the Ninth Circuit stayed that ruling on February 9, 2026, pending appeal. The Nepal TPS termination is distinct from other 2025 TPS actions: the Venezuela termination (DHS, September 2025) and Honduras termination (DHS, July 2025) targeted separate nationally-designated populations on separate dates. Terminations that federal courts have found to reflect discriminatory purpose fall within the archive's scope, as the judicial finding of racial animus directly bears on whether the statutory standard was applied in good faith.