If anyone on your payroll works under a Temporary Protected Status employment authorization document from Haiti or Syria, their work authorization has already expired — and every shift you schedule them for after the deadline without fresh reverification paperwork is a separate gamble with federal penalties worth thousands of dollars per worker. This is not a drill for "someday." The deadlines passed in July, the grace periods and court-ordered extensions have run their course, and the employees affected are disproportionately the back-of-house workers restaurants can least afford to lose mid-service.
This guide walks through what changed, the exact I-9 reverification steps to take now, the mistakes that turn a paperwork headache into a discrimination claim or a knowing-hire violation, and how to book the very real cost of rebuilding your roster.
What Happened: From Protected Status to Expired EADs in About Six Weeks
Temporary Protected Status lets nationals of designated countries live and work in the United States legally, with employment authorization documents (EADs) typically coded A12 or C19. For years, Haitian and Syrian workers — heavily represented in restaurant kitchens, dish pits, and prep lines — renewed those EADs on a predictable cycle.
That cycle broke in the summer of 2026. The Supreme Court cleared the way for the Department of Homeland Security to terminate the Haiti and Syria TPS designations, and DHS moved to end them. What followed was what one immigration-law analysis aptly called "compliance whiplash": USCIS guidance listed July 1 as the work-authorization expiration date for Haiti and Syria, then extended it to July 10, then published new "placeholder dates" pushing EAD validity to mid- and late July, and a federal appeals court then temporarily preserved Haiti TPS employment authorization through July 27 while litigation played out. Some countries saw three different published dates in barely two weeks.
As of this writing, those extensions have lapsed. Unless your employee has secured a different immigration status or a new, independently valid EAD, a TPS-based EAD from Haiti or Syria is an expired document — and an expired TPS EAD cannot support continued employment. DHS has also moved to terminate TPS for additional countries, so the same drill may soon apply to workers from other designations. Before you do anything else, check the current USCIS TPS country page and I-9 Central guidance rather than relying on a date you remember from June.
The restaurant industry felt this first and hardest. The National Restaurant Association publicly pressed DHS for relief ahead of the deadlines, and in a July 1 letter to the administration asked for targeted measures such as deferred action with work authorization for vetted, long-serving employees — a sign of how many kitchens were about to lose people they could not quickly replace. Roughly one in three operators already report lacking sufficient staff, and industry employment, which peaked around 12.4 million in May 2026, softened through the summer even before the full effect of the TPS expirations registered.
What Expiration Means for This Week's Schedule
The core legal rule is blunt: once an employee's employment authorization expires and they cannot present new valid documentation, you may not continue to employ them. Continuing to employ someone you know is no longer authorized exposes the business to liability under section 274A of the Immigration and Nationality Act — civil fines that escalate with repeat violations, and in egregious pattern-or-practice cases, criminal exposure.
That does not mean you march into the kitchen and fire people on the spot. The compliant sequence is:
- Identify affected employees now. Pull every Form I-9 where Section 2 or a prior reverification rests on a TPS-based EAD (category A12 or C19), for Haiti and Syria first, then every other TPS country as terminations advance.
- Notify each affected employee privately and in writing that their documented work authorization has expired, that you must reverify by a specific near-term date, and that they may present any valid List A or List C document of their choice.
- Give them a genuine chance to produce new documentation. Some workers will have another status, a pending application with its own extension, or a new EAD. Do not assume otherwise.
- If no valid document appears, remove them from the schedule. Whether you formally terminate or place them on unpaid leave pending documentation is a judgment call to make with counsel — but you cannot keep paying them for hours worked without authorization.
Do not "keep them on while the lawyers sort it out." Good-faith confusion about shifting July dates was understandable in July. In September, with the extensions long lapsed, continued employment without reverification reads as knowing.
The Reverification Playbook: Supplement B, Done Right
Reverification happens on paper — never in E-Verify. The instrument is Supplement B (formerly Section 3) of the current Form I-9. The steps:
Pull the original I-9 and check what it rests on
Review Section 2 (or the most recent prior reverification) for each employee. If the List A or List C document has expired — or its automatic extension has ended — reverification is due no later than the expiration date. If the employee's original I-9 is an outdated version of the form, complete the current Form I-9 or a current Supplement B and attach it to the old record.
Have the employee present a valid List A or List C document
The employee chooses what to present — a new EAD, a green card, an unrestricted Social Security card plus a List B identity document, or any other acceptable List A or List C item. Three constraints matter enormously:
- Do not accept the expired TPS EAD. It is no longer evidence of authorization, even if it was valid when first presented.
- Do not reverify identity documents. List B documents (like a driver's license) never get reverified. Reverification covers employment authorization only.
- Do not demand a specific document. Telling a Haitian cook "bring me your new EAD" when a green card or other valid document would do is document abuse — and it is one of the fastest ways to convert a compliance exercise into a discrimination charge. Let the employee choose.
Complete and file Supplement B
Enter the new document's title, number, and expiration date, sign and date the block, and keep it with the original I-9. You may attach the relevant USCIS country-specific alert or a printout of the USCIS extension page as supporting documentation — cheap insurance if your dates are ever questioned. If you use E-Verify, note that its Status Change Report now flags TPS and asylum-related EADs whose validity has changed; employees appearing on that report need paper reverification through Supplement B.
Calendar every other TPS country the same way
Terminations are rolling, not one-and-done. Build a simple tickler — a spreadsheet or a recurring task in whatever system holds your I-9s — keyed to each TPS country's published expiration and auto-extension dates, and recheck the USCIS country pages monthly. The employers who scrambled hardest this summer were the ones who tracked one country's date and got blindsided by the next.
Five Mistakes That Make Everything Worse
1. Reverifying too early or too broadly. Reverify only when authorization actually expires, and only the authorization — never the identity document. Demanding fresh papers from workers whose EADs are still covered by an automatic extension is both unnecessary and legally risky.
2. Reverifying selectively. Auditing only Haitian and Syrian employees' I-9s while ignoring everyone else's expiring documents looks like national-origin discrimination even if your motive was diligence. Apply one consistent, documented process to every employee whose authorization expires, regardless of where they are from.
3. Specifying which document to bring. As noted above, the choice belongs to the employee. "Bring any valid List A or C document from the official list" is the sentence to use — ideally printed on the official Lists of Acceptable Documents, which you hand to the employee.
4. Using E-Verify to reverify. E-Verify confirms new hires; it does not process reverifications. Running one anyway creates a confusing paper trail and satisfies nothing.
5. Keeping no record of the shifting dates. If an auditor asks why someone worked through July 24, "the dates kept moving" is a story; a filed copy of the USCIS alert in effect that week is evidence. Attach the guidance you relied on, every time.
On the penalty side, keep the two tiers straight. Paperwork violations — missing, late, or defective I-9s — draw per-form civil fines that add up fast across a whole staff. Knowingly hiring or continuing to employ an unauthorized worker is the heavier tier: substantially larger per-worker civil penalties that escalate for second and subsequent offenses, potential criminal fines and imprisonment for a demonstrated pattern or practice, and possible debarment from federal contracts. The first tier punishes sloppiness; the second punishes decisions. Make sure yours are defensible.
Rebuilding the Roster: Budget for the Real Cost
Losing even two or three experienced back-of-house workers lands differently in a restaurant than in most businesses. Industry turnover already runs near 27 percent, replacing a single hourly worker routinely costs several thousand dollars in recruiting, onboarding, and lost productivity, and 167,000 hospitality openings sat unfilled earlier this year even before this disruption. When authorization expirations force same-week departures, the costs stack: overtime premiums for the crew covering extra shifts, temp-agency markups, signing bonuses or raised starting wages to fill the gap, and slower ticket times that show up as smaller covers and weaker reviews.
Treat this as a discrete, trackable event in your books rather than letting it dissolve into general labor cost:
- Code the response costs separately. Overtime premiums, temp-staffing invoices, job-board spend, referral bonuses, and training hours tied to replacing affected workers belong in separate accounts or classes, not buried in regular payroll. You cannot evaluate what the disruption cost — or budget for the next country's deadline — if the dollars are invisible.
- Accrue what you can see coming. If additional TPS designations affecting your staff have published end dates, accrue estimated recruiting and overtime costs and build the hiring pipeline before the date, not after it.
- Keep I-9s past the last paycheck. Retain each Form I-9 for three years after the hire date or one year after employment ends, whichever is later. Post-termination audits are common, and a clean, complete I-9 file with attached USCIS guidance is your best defense.
- Document the business decision. A short memo — dates checked, employees notified, documents requested, actions taken — contemporaneously filed, is worth more than any after-the-fact explanation.
Longer term, the staffing math argues for widening the pipeline now: cross-train front-of-house staff on prep work, formalize an employee-referral bonus, and build relationships with culinary programs and staffing agencies before the next designation ends. And take the industry's advocacy seriously as a signal — when the national trade association is asking the White House for work-authorization relief for vetted, tax-paying, long-serving employees, it is telling you these workers are structurally load-bearing, not interchangeable.
Simplify Your Financial Management
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