USCIS Extends Ukraine and Sudan TPS Work Permits to 19 October for Those Still Waiting on a Card

USCIS said on 14 August that it is sending notices to Ukrainian and Sudanese Temporary Protected Status holders who are still eligible for TPS but have not received a renewed work permit, extending their expired cards through 19 October 2026. The extension covers people whose TPS-based application for a new Employment Authorization Document is still pending. It matters because their authorisation to work had already lapsed: under the government's reading of several interacting rules, employment authorisation for many TPS beneficiaries from these countries ran out on 22 July, and a court declined on 5 August to block that interpretation. The notice restores a documented right to work, but only up to 19 October, the date on which USCIS says the TPS designations and related benefits are set to terminate.

Background

Ukraine and Sudan were both designated for TPS, and both designations were extended in early 2025 for 18 months running to 19 October 2026. What changed since then was not the designation but the paperwork underneath it. H.R.1, the reconciliation law passed in July 2025, limited the validity of TPS employment authorisation documents to one year. That interacted with a series of TPS termination actions and with the 540-day cap on automatic extensions available to people who filed their renewal before 30 October 2025. Read together, and applied retroactively, those rules cut short work authorisation that beneficiaries had already been granted, with an end date of 22 July 2026. Plaintiffs challenged the retroactive reading. A district court initially granted emergency relief in their favour, then on 5 August reconsidered and upheld the government's position, declining to stop it from shortening the EAD validity. That left a group of people who remain eligible for TPS, who have a renewal application sitting with USCIS, and who had nothing valid to show an employer. The 14 August notices are the agency's answer to that gap.

What exactly changed

USCIS is issuing individual notices, by post and electronically to anyone with a myUSCIS account, confirming that an expired TPS-based EAD is extended to 19 October 2026. The extension is not automatic in the sense of applying to any card. It is tied to specific card expiration dates and to category codes A-12 or C-19. For Ukraine, the qualifying EAD expiration dates are 19 April 2025 and 19 October 2023. For Sudan, the list is longer: 19 April 2025, 30 June 2024, 31 December 2022, 4 October 2021, 4 January 2021, 2 January 2020, 2 April 2019, 2 November 2018 and 2 November 2017. The card alone is not enough. USCIS is explicit that the employee presents a combination — the expired EAD together with the USCIS notice — as a List A document establishing identity and work authorisation through 19 October. Employers completing Form I-9 enter 19 October 2026 as the expiration date in Sections 1 and 2, add a note in the Additional Information box, and enter the same date when running the case in E-Verify.

Who it affects

This reaches a specific group rather than every TPS holder. If your renewal EAD already arrived, nothing here changes for you. The people who need to act are those who filed a renewal, are still waiting, and have been carrying an expired card since April 2025 or earlier. In practice that has meant a stretch of weeks since 22 July in which an employer running a reverification found no valid document, and some people will have been taken off payroll or put on unpaid leave in the meantime. Employers are the other affected party: a company that reverified a Ukrainian or Sudanese TPS employee in late July and could not complete it now has a defined path to close out the I-9 correctly. The instruction to attach the alert and the USCIS notice to the Form I-9 exists precisely so the file shows why an expired card was accepted.

What this means in practice

If you are in this group, watch for the notice by post and check your myUSCIS account, since USCIS is sending it both ways. Keep the notice with the expired card, because presented separately neither one does the job. If you have already been taken off work, the notice is what you bring to your employer to restart the reverification. The harder point is the horizon: 19 October is nine weeks out, and it is the end of the designation, not a renewal of it. USCIS describes the designation and related benefits as set to terminate on that date, and it is not yet known whether DHS will re-designate either country. Anyone relying on TPS for their status in the US should be using this window to take advice on alternatives rather than treating October as a date that will move. Our United States country guide (/country-guides/united-states) covers the wider landscape of statuses and permits, and USCIS's own TPS pages for Ukraine and Sudan are the place to check for changes.