The Job You Lost: What an Employer May and May Not Do — and What You Are Still Owed

Six weeks ago the work permits stopped. What has happened since is not one dramatic event but thousands of quiet ones — a shift ending, a badge handed back, a final paycheck that may or may not have come. This week the layoffs finally acquired names and numbers, and one of the few things a laid-off worker can actually do about them became verifiable.

Start with what the government did, because almost everyone has it slightly wrong.

TPS for Haiti and Syria was terminated effective July 27, 2026, and the work permits attached to it expired the same day. That is a change to a document. It is not an order from an immigration judge telling you to leave the country, and this page has said so since July. But the paperwork change was made operational in a way that most people never saw. On Aug. 11, USCIS added TPS-based work permits — the categories printed on the card as A12 and C19 — to the E-Verify Status Change Report, refreshed every two weeks, which means an employer can now pull a list of its own staff whose cards the government has voided.

That single administrative step explains the shape of what followed. USCIS said plainly at the time that your card can still look valid, because the government does not take the old cards back. So a great many people were laid off from jobs they were doing well, holding a piece of plastic that looked exactly the way it did in June, by employers who had learned about it from a report rather than from them.

What the layoffs actually look like

For weeks the only number available was national. Reuters reported on Aug. 19, from a census analysis by the Princeton research fellow Philip Connor, that about 21,000 of the Haitians who held TPS worked as caregivers and nursing assistants last year, serving roughly 77,000 patients. In Rockland County, New York, the nonprofit Jawonio laid off nearly two dozen Haitian staff — about 7% of its workforce.

Since then the picture has filled in, employer by employer, and this week the BBC added two more. On Long Island, AHRC Nassau, which supports people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, let go 19 Haitian staff this year. One of them was the aide for Linda Mancuso’s 23-year-old son Michael, who is nonverbal and needs help with showering, eating and tying his shoes. In Florida, Jewish Community Services of South Florida lost 18 Haitian TPS holders, and the aides who remain are working overtime — many of their clients are Holocaust survivors who had relationships with those caregivers going back years.

These are not four separate waves. They are the same wave, reported from four places, and it is worth saying so plainly: do not add these figures together into a running total of people removed from the country. Nobody in these accounts was deported. They lost jobs.

It is not only health care. Wesly Simon, who owns a Haitian restaurant in Brooklyn’s Little Caribbean, told Scripps News on Aug. 28 that he had to let longtime workers go: “It’s like I’m firing the whole family. I’m firing the kids, I’m firing their wife.” He said it has been harder on the business than the pandemic he opened during — “COVID we have the stimulus. There’s no stimulus.”

Claimed versus verified

Two things are being said about all of this, and they are not equally well supported.

Verified: employers are losing staff they want to keep, and they are saying so on the record. AHRC Nassau’s chief executive, Stanfort Perry, told the BBC it takes months to recruit and train one direct-support worker, and that he competes for staff with fast-food restaurants and grocery stores that pay more. Kezia Scales of the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute told the BBC that Haiti is among the top five countries the U.S. direct-care workforce comes from. Jewish Community Services has been writing to elected officials. In Rockland County, Rep. Mike Lawler’s office told Reuters it was working with Jawonio to see whether other legal statuses were available to the people laid off.

Not verified, and worth being careful about: none of that is a promise that anyone is getting their job back, and no bill has changed the law. A measure to extend TPS for Haiti cleared the House in April by 224-204 and its Senate companion has not passed. A bill that clears one chamber is not law. If somebody offers to sign you up, for a fee, for an extension or a program that does not exist yet, that is a scam — and it is the specific scam this moment produces.

What has not changed

This is the part that survives every headline, and it is the part most often given away by people who assume that losing a permit means losing everything.

Wages you have already earned are owed to you, whatever your status. If a job ended, ask about your final paycheck before you stop dealing with that employer.

An employer may not use this as cover to treat you differently. California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, published formal guidance on Sept. 3 setting out limits that come from federal law and therefore hold everywhere, not only in California: an employer must not demand more or different documents than Form I-9 requires, must not insist on one specific document, must not reject documents that reasonably appear genuine because of your national origin or citizenship status, must not re-verify a worker whose authorization is still valid, must give a worker the chance to present acceptable documents when re-verification is required, and must not retaliate. “Changes to Temporary Protected Status can create uncertainty for workers and employers alike,” Bonta said, “but uncertainty does not erase workers’ rights.”

Losing a job is not a deportation order, and neither is losing TPS. If, separately, an immigration judge has already ordered your removal, that is a real and different situation — see a lawyer about it this week.

What to do this week

1. Ask about the money you are owed. Final paycheck, unused paid time off if your employer offers it, anything withheld. This does not depend on your status.

2. Use the federal worker hotline — and know what it will and will not do. The Justice Department’s Immigrant and Employee Rights Section runs a free Worker Hotline: 1-800-255-7688, Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern. This site published that number on Sept. 3 and said honestly that it could not confirm what languages the line answers in. That gap is now partly closed: IER’s own page states that callers may remain anonymous and that language interpretation services are available, and that IER can sometimes help with immigration-related problems that are not about the workplace at all. Haitian Creole is not named anywhere on that page — so say the name of the language you need, and if you can, have someone who can interpret sit with you when you call. The line is for an employer demanding a particular document, refusing documents that look genuine, treating you differently because of where you are from, or retaliating against you for raising it.

3. Have a lawyer check whether anything else you have filed lets you work. This is the single most commonly skipped step, and Rockland County is the reason to take it seriously: a member of Congress’s office went looking for other legal statuses for laid-off workers, which means it was not obvious to anyone that none existed. Do not decide you are out of options before somebody qualified has looked. Free legal help →

4. Write down what happened, while you remember it. The date you were told, who told you, what documents you were asked for, whether you were offered a chance to present anything else. If it later turns out your employer did something it was not allowed to do, that record is the case.

5. If your family is Salvadoran, this arrives for you on Sept. 9. El Salvador’s TPS designation is scheduled to end that day, per the notice USCIS gave employers, and as of today the Federal Register still carries no DHS notice ending or extending it — this site checks that every day. The E-Verify mechanism described at the top of this article is the same one. Everything on this page about final paychecks, document demands and the worker hotline applies identically.

The sentence that matters most

The hardest thing about this particular loss is that it invites a conclusion the facts do not support: that there is nothing left here, and that leaving is the only remaining option. Employers are on the record saying the opposite about the people they had to let go. A hospital in Haiti is recruiting former TPS holders, and that is a real offer, but nobody has to take it — and leaving the United States can change whether and when you are able to come back, which is a question for a lawyer before it is a question for a plane ticket.

Your paperwork decides your case. It does not decide your Tuesday morning. Plan for Tuesday morning separately — and keep the case going.

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