The White House took a fresh swipe at the “third world” on Friday as the Donald Trump administration continued its crackdown against immigration. The remarks came hours after a federal judge postponed the attempts to terminate temporary protected status for Ethiopia. The POTUS also took to social media, lambasting the preceding Joe Biden administration for granting Haitians temporary protection status and accusing “deranged liberal judges” of standing in his way.

“If you import the Third World, you become the Third World,” the White House quoted Trump as saying.

The US President had also shared a similar post via Truth Social last week.

According to a recent New York Times report, the Trump administration has systematically pressured immigration judges over the past year to push its immigration agenda. It reportedly threatened them with disciplinary action if they did not deport more people and fired those seen as insufficiently supportive of the president’s aggressive enforcement agenda.

US judge postpones termination of temporary status for Ethiopians

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s decision to end a temporary status that has protected more than 5,000 Ethiopians from deportation and allowed them to live and work in the United States. In his Wednesday decision, US District Judge Brian Murphy from Massachusetts said the Trump administration terminated the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) “without regard for the process delineated by Congress”.

The decision came at a time when hundreds of thousands of TPS holders from different nationalities are challenging the termination of their status at the federal courts. It represents the latest legal setback for the Trump administration’s efforts to put an end to TPS as part of his hard-line immigration policy.

More than 1 million migrants from 17 countries were protected by TPS during former president Joe Biden’s administration. But the Department of Homeland Security has terminated the designation for 13 of those countries since President Donald Trump came to office for his second term in January 2025.