A hundred thousand workers are legal to employ. The paperwork says otherwise.

What happened on Monday

Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, lets people from a country in crisis live and work in the United States for a fixed period. The designations for Ukraine and Sudan were set to run out on 19 October 2026.

On Sunday 18 October, the Department of Homeland Security told CBS News that final decisions on both programs will be made at the appropriate time, and that people enrolled keep their protection until then. A spokesperson gave CNN the same words.

Nothing was published in the Federal Register. On Monday the government's own TPS pages for Ukraine and Sudan still showed 19 October as the end of the designation.

Who this covers

About 103,700 Ukrainians and about 1,900 Sudanese were eligible to re-register when the two designations were last extended in January 2025. Most arrived after Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 and the war in Sudan that began in 2023.

They work in restaurants, construction and health care, among other places. Their employers hold a work permit for each of them, and those permits were extended only to 19 October.

Figure 1 sets out how the two designations reached their end date with nothing decided. An extension in January 2025, a missed deadline in August, two employer notices naming 19 October, then a statement to a reporter the night before.

What the law says

The TPS statute requires the secretary to decide at least 60 days before a designation ends. If no decision is made, the designation is extended by six months automatically.

That 60-day deadline fell on 20 August. It passed without a notice. By the law's own terms, both designations now run to 19 April 2027.

The government has applied exactly this rule before. In May 2026 it posted a notice recording a six-month automatic extension for Lebanon, after the secretary missed the deadline there. It has not done so for Ukraine or Sudan.

El Salvador's designation reached its end date on 9 September with the same treatment: a website statement that an announcement would come at the appropriate time, and no notice since.

Why employers are the ones exposed

Protection exists on paper and in the law. The problem is proof. An employer has to check a worker's permission to work on a form called the I-9, and a statement to a news outlet cannot go in that file.

Until the government names a new date, companies with Ukrainian or Sudanese staff face a gap: a permit that reads as expired and no document to replace it. The last time this happened, for Lebanon, the government named the new permit dates on the day it posted the notice.

The courts offer little help. In June the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the statute bars judicial review of most challenges to a TPS termination. If the government does decide to end either designation, that decision will be hard to contest.

The wider pattern

Since January 2025 the administration has ended, or moved to end, TPS for 13 of the 17 countries that had it, covering about 1 million of 1.3 million people. Four designations were still in force this autumn: El Salvador, Lebanon, Ukraine and Sudan.

Three of the four have now reached their end date without a published decision. Only Lebanon got a notice. The pattern looks less like a reprieve than a policy of not publishing, which keeps every option open while the people covered carry documents that say the wrong thing.

For Sudan the stakes are of a different kind. The US government has found one side in that war responsible for genocide, keeps its highest travel warning on the whole country, and has had no embassy there since April 2023. Ending the designation would send about 1,900 people into those conditions.

What to watch

The most likely path through November is silence on the record, with the statute doing the work. A late notice that merely records the automatic extension would settle the paperwork. A termination notice could not take effect before 19 April 2027.

Three people decide how this ends, shown below: the secretary who missed the deadline, and the senator and the representative behind the two bills.

Markwayne Mullin

Secretary of Homeland Security

Missed the 60-day deadline for both designations; his department says decisions will come at the appropriate time.

Lisa Murkowski

Senator, Alaska

Co-sponsor of the 23 September Senate bill to extend TPS for Ukrainians.

Jason Crow

Representative, Colorado

Introduced the 7 October House bill that would extend Ukrainian TPS through June 2029.

• The Federal Register's public inspection list, where immigration notices appear a day before publication.
• The USCIS TPS pages for Ukraine and Sudan, which carry the end date and the work-permit guidance.
• E-Verify and I-9 Central alerts, which named Lebanon's new permit dates on the day its notice posted.
• Two bills to extend Ukraine's status in law: one in the Senate from 23 September, one in the House from 7 October that would run it to June 2029.

Sources

• The January 2025 Federal Register notices extending both designations, which carry the re-registration counts.
• CBS News and CNN, 18 October 2026, for the department's statement; Bloomberg Law, 19 October.
• USCIS employer updates of 14 August and 3 September 2026 on the permit dates.
• 8 U.S.C. 1254a(b)(3)(C) for the 60-day rule and the six-month extension; the May 2026 Lebanon notice.
• Mullin v. Doe, decided 25 June 2026; Pew Research for the count of designations ended since January 2025.
• The fuller version, with every figure cited, is Vektora intel alert AL35.