El Salvador TPS After September 9: USCIS Says Protection and Work Authorization Continue Until an Announcement Is Made

What Changed, and When

The background is in our earlier post, El Salvador TPS Is Set to End September 9, 2026 — and DHS Never Published the Decision Federal Law Called for by July 11. In short: the January 17, 2025 Federal Register notice extended El Salvador’s designation for 18 months, through September 9, 2026; USCIS alerts to Form I-9 and E-Verify employers on August 12 and September 3 said the designation and related benefits were “set to terminate” on that date; and the statutory 60-day determination date of July 11, 2026 passed with nothing published either way.

On September 9, 2026, the expiration date itself, the sequence reported by the American Immigration Lawyers Association and by the Associated Press ran like this. During the afternoon, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson gave reporters a statement: “An announcement on El Salvador’s TPS will be made at the appropriate time. Until such announcement is made, Salvadoran individuals present in the U.S. under TPS retain protection.” That version said nothing about work permits, and immigration attorneys quoted by the Associated Press that afternoon said the cards had expired that day with no extension.

Later that evening, USCIS posted an alert on its El Salvador TPS country page and on the E-Verify page carrying the September 3 employer notice. As quoted by the American Immigration Lawyers Association on September 10 and in a same-day letter from counsel for the National TPS Alliance, the alert reads in full:

“An announcement on El Salvador’s TPS will be made at the appropriate time. Until such announcement is made, Salvadoran individuals present in the U.S. under TPS retain protection including work authorization.”

The added words are “including work authorization.” That is the entire text. It carries no date, no new expiration, no signature and no Federal Register citation. As of the date on this page, the most recent Federal Register document concerning El Salvador’s designation that we can locate remains the January 17, 2025 extension notice.

Two Precedents That Point in Opposite Directions

The statute says two things about this moment. Under INA section 244(b)(3), 8 U.S.C. section 1254a(b)(3), if the Secretary does not determine by the 60-day review date that the country no longer meets the conditions for designation, the designation is extended for an additional 6 months, or 12 or 18 at the Secretary’s discretion. Separately, a termination must be published in the Federal Register and cannot take effect earlier than 60 days after that publication. The National TPS Alliance’s counsel letter relies on that second provision to tell employers that, whatever is announced, a termination could not take effect for at least 60 days after it is published, during which TPS holders would remain work-authorized. That is the position of an organization with a stated point of view, and we report it as its reading.

The AILA practice alert, written for immigration lawyers rather than for the public, lays out why the profession is not treating the web alert as settled. It cites two recent cases where DHS missed a deadline and the outcomes diverged. For Honduras, the designation was set to expire July 5, 2025; DHS announced a termination on July 7 and published it in the Federal Register on July 8 with a September 8, 2025 effective date. For South Sudan, DHS published a notice on May 6, 2025 stating that because the Secretary was unable to make an informed determination by the 60-day deadline, the designation was automatically extended for six months, and USCIS said the same on the country page. AILA’s stated inference is that if DHS intended an automatic extension for El Salvador, it would likely have said so. The Associated Press reported a third data point: in May 2026, protections for about 11,000 Lebanese were automatically extended for another 180 days when no action was taken.

AILA also flags the practical problem. The alert does not tell employers how to document continuing work authorization on Form I-9, and, as of its September 10 update, SAVE and E-Verify had not provided updated expiration dates or guidance. Its advice to its own members was to caution clients against relying on informal announcements alone, because a person cannot demonstrate authorization under Form I-9 rules with a card that shows an expired date and no extension notice attached to it. We are not resolving that tension on this page, and no general article can. It is a live question, and it is precisely the kind of question a lawyer answers by reading a specific person’s documents against what the agency has actually published on the day they are read.

Who in Texas This Reaches

The Associated Press puts the number of people from El Salvador living in the United States under TPS at about 200,000; the advocacy groups FWD.us and the National TPS Alliance use about 170,000. Salvadorans are the longest-tenured TPS population in the country — the designation dates to the earthquakes of 2001 — and many have held the status continuously for about 25 years, renewing it each cycle. Reporting by Houston Public Media on August 17, 2026 put roughly 147,000 TPS holders in Texas across all countries, with Salvadorans among the three largest groups, concentrated in Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth but present in the Rio Grande Valley, Central Texas and the smaller cities where construction, transportation, food service and building maintenance employ them.

The people the alert reaches are not only TPS holders. Employers enrolled in E-Verify received the August 12 and September 3 notices and then the September 9 alert on the same page, and an employer has its own legal duties around Form I-9 and reverification that do not pause while the government decides. Spouses and U.S. citizen children are affected by what happens to a household earner’s ability to work. A Salvadoran TPS holder quoted by the Associated Press described a mortgage and a daughter in her third year of university, both of which depended on a job whose legal footing she could no longer explain to her employer.

El Salvador is one of four countries that still had TPS in force as of September 9. According to the Associated Press, the remaining designations carry termination dates in October for Ukraine and Sudan and in November for Lebanon. Ukraine’s October 19 date has the same unpublished-determination problem, as described in our September 7 post.

What This Changes Legally

Protection from removal and authorization to work are two different things, and the alert addresses both — but differently than a notice would. An Employment Authorization Document’s printed date can be extended by a Federal Register notice, by a pending renewal application, or by an individual USCIS notice. The September 9 alert is none of those. It is a statement on a web page. What that statement is worth to a particular employer looking at a particular card is the question AILA has raised and the government has not yet answered.

A termination, if one comes, has a built-in runway. The statute requires Federal Register publication and at least 60 days between publication and effect. The Honduras example shows what that looks like in practice: an announcement two days after expiration, publication the next day, and an effective date two months later. Whether a similar pattern would apply here is not something anyone can promise; it is a fact about how the last one worked.

Judicial review of the designation itself is narrow. On June 25, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Mullin v. Doe, No. 25-1083, which, as the Congressional Research Service summarized it, held that Congress barred judicial review of non-constitutional challenges to a decision to terminate a country’s designation. The practical consequence is that a person’s options are more likely to be about their own case and filings than about the designation.

TPS interacts with the one-year asylum filing deadline. USCIS’s El Salvador TPS page states that being granted and maintaining TPS until a reasonable period before filing an asylum application is considered an extraordinary circumstance for purposes of the one-year deadline, citing 8 C.F.R. section 208.4(a)(5)(iv). Whether that matters for a given person, and how much time it leaves, is fact-specific.

Employers carry independent exposure. An employer is responsible for tracking the work authorization of its workforce and can be audited. A workplace that reads the August and September “set to terminate” notices and then a one-sentence alert with no date on it may well move faster than the legal picture behind either document, in either direction.

What Kind of Option Might Apply

Nothing here is a prediction about any individual case, and nothing here says whether any particular person does or does not qualify for anything. Those are determinations that depend on facts we do not have. What an immigration lawyer can review, on the actual documents, includes:

• What a specific Employment Authorization Document is actually valid through today, reading the category code, the “Card Expires” date, any individual extension notice received under the September 3 update, and how the September 9 alert does or does not attach to that card.
• What to put in front of an employer who is asking, and what an employer’s Form I-9 obligations are while the government has said nothing more.
• Whether any other form of relief or status may be available — asylum, a family-based petition, an employment-based path, adjustment of status, or other avenues — and what the one-year asylum deadline and the TPS exception to it mean for that person after roughly 25 years in the country.
• What a pending Form I-821 or Form I-765 receipt notice means for the interval ahead.
• How a household’s situation fits together when a spouse or a U.S. citizen child has a different immigration posture.
• What to watch for, including any Federal Register publication and any change to the USCIS or E-Verify pages, so a decision is made on the record rather than on a rumor.

Nonprofit accredited representatives and community legal-aid organizations also assist TPS holders. Where a person’s status, a longer-term strategy, or an employer’s exposure is involved, that is attorney territory. It is common to use both.

Why Acting Quickly Can Matter

The useful thing about this moment is that the government has said, in its own words, that protection continues for now. That is room to work with, and it is better used gathering documents than waiting for the next alert. The part of an immigration matter that consumes calendar time is rarely the form. It is the supporting evidence — a birth certificate, a marriage record, a translated document, an employment letter — that has to be requested from someone else and waited on. If a termination is published, the statute’s 60-day minimum starts on the publication date, and a person who has already met with a lawyer enters that window with a plan rather than a question. If an extension is published instead, nothing has been lost. Talking to an immigration lawyer earlier leaves more of that room available. If a lawyer in our network offers an initial consultation, it is free.

Sources

1. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, “Temporary Protected Status Designated Country: El Salvador,” alert posted September 9, 2026 (primary document; text as quoted by AILA and by counsel for the National TPS Alliance, below).
2. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, “Update on Temporary Protected Status for El Salvador,” E-Verify notice of September 3, 2026, carrying the September 9 alert.
3. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Extension of the Designation of El Salvador for Temporary Protected Status,” Federal Register, January 17, 2025.
4. Immigration and Nationality Act section 244(b)(3), 8 U.S.C. section 1254a(b)(3) (review, extension and termination procedure; 60-day publication requirement).
5. American Immigration Lawyers Association, “Practice Alert: DHS Fails to Make an Official Determination on TPS for El Salvador,” AILA Doc. No. 26090902, September 9, 2026, updated September 10, 2026.
6. Rob Hayes and Gisela Salomon, Associated Press, “Salvadoran TPS holders can stay in US for now, but attorneys say they can’t legally work,” via ABC13 Houston, September 10, 2026.
7. Jessica Bansal, counsel for the National TPS Alliance, “Status of Employment Authorization for El Salvadoran TPS Holders,” letter dated September 9, 2026 (advocacy organization; its reading of the statute is reported as its own).
8. Houston Public Media, “TPS recipients hope a potential change of power in Congress provides relief from deportation,” August 17, 2026 (Texas TPS population figures; also carried by KERA News).
9. Supreme Court of the United States, Mullin v. Doe, No. 25-1083, decided June 25, 2026; Congressional Research Service, Legal Sidebar LSB11446.