After Mullin v. Doe: Why Immigration Counsel Belongs in the Room Before the Problem Arrives

Most employers first learn they have a work authorization problem when a manager forwards an email that begins, “HR flagged something on my employee’s file.” By then, the decisions are all bad ones: keep the person working and accept legal exposure, or move quickly and accept a different kind of exposure. There is rarely a clean option left.

The Supreme Court’s June 25 decision in Mullin v. Doe is a useful case study in how that happens — and in why the organizations that weather these moments are the ones that built the relationship with immigration counsel long before the ruling came down.

What the Court Actually Decided

In a 6–3 opinion authored by Justice Alito, the Court held that 8 U.S.C. §1254a(b)(5)(A) bars judicial review of non-constitutional claims challenging the designation, extension, or termination of TPS. The consolidated cases — Mullin v. Doe, involving Syrian TPS holders, and Trump v. Miot, involving Haitian TPS holders — had produced district court orders postponing the terminations during litigation. The Court reversed that interim relief and remanded. It also concluded that the Haitian plaintiffs’ equal protection claim was unlikely to succeed, finding insufficient evidence that race was a motivating factor in the termination decision. Justice Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson.

Roughly 350,000 Haitian nationals and 6,000 Syrian nationals were directly in scope. But the jurisdictional holding is the part that should hold your attention. By reading the review bar broadly, the Court removed the primary mechanism that had been slowing TPS terminations across the board. Litigation over other designations — Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Burma, and others, accounting for hundreds of thousands more work-authorized individuals — now proceeds in a materially different posture.

Here is what the decision did not do, and this distinction has already tripped people up: it did not itself terminate anyone’s employment authorization, did not require employers to take immediate action, and did not set reverification timing. That was left to DHS and USCIS.

The Operational Reality Is Already Here

USCIS issued country-specific updates on July 10 that supersede its earlier guidance. Affected TPS beneficiaries retain status and work authorization for now under court-ordered extensions while the lower courts align with Mullin. For Form I-9 and E-Verify purposes, employers were directed to use July 17, 2026 as the EAD expiration date for Syria, South Sudan, Yemen, Ethiopia, Burma, and Somalia, and July 24, 2026 for Haiti.

Read those dates against today’s calendar. That is the entire runway.

And the mechanics underneath are genuinely messy:

• The documents themselves are a mess. Haitian employees may be holding EADs with printed expiration dates going back years, kept alive through a patchwork of court orders, Federal Register notices, and USCIS placeholder dates. The face of the card tells you almost nothing. An I-9 file that looks clean can be sitting on an expired authorization, and one that looks expired may be perfectly valid. Neither is a comfortable position in an audit.
• A TPS-based EAD cannot be used for reverification. When the moment comes, the employee must present an alternative qualifying document from the List of Acceptable Documents. Many will have one. Some will not.
• The dates will move again. This guidance superseded prior guidance, which superseded guidance before that. It is tied to active litigation and will change.
• The exposure runs in both directions. Continuing to employ someone you know lacks authorization carries civil penalties — up to roughly $2,861 per I-9 paperwork violation and up to $28,619 per worker for knowing-hire violations — and ICE audit volume has increased dramatically since 2025. But terminating an employee prematurely, or demanding a specific document from someone who looks or sounds foreign, creates wrongful termination and document-abuse exposure under INA §274B. There is no safe direction to over-correct in.

 Best Practices for HR Teams

• Know who you have. You cannot plan around a population you cannot name. Run your I-9 records and identify every employee whose authorization derives from TPS, and from which country. If your HRIS does not capture the basis of authorization — only the expiration date — that is a gap worth closing now. If you use E-Verify, the Status Change Report will surface rescissions of EADs issued under humanitarian programs that were valid when the case was created.
• Track by country, not by card. Build a tracking log keyed to country designation and current USCIS guidance, not to the date printed on the EAD. Annotate Section 2 per the country-specific USCIS instructions and consider attaching the relevant USCIS alert to the employee’s I-9 file. Future you, sitting across from an auditor, will want the documentation trail showing what the guidance said on the day you acted.
• Calendar reverification early and reverify on time. Set reminders ahead of the applicable date. Reverify on or before the Section 2 expiration date — not after.
• Do not freelance. No suspensions, no termination notices, no “let’s just get ahead of this” moves without counsel. The impulse to act decisively is understandable and, in this area, expensive.
• Never ask for a specific document. Accept any valid, current document from the List of Acceptable Documents that the employee chooses to present. This rule does not bend because the situation is urgent or because you think you know what the person has.
• Train managers on what not to say. Most document-abuse and discrimination claims do not originate in HR. They originate with a well-meaning supervisor asking a question they had no business asking.
• Plan for the humans. These are colleagues who may be losing their ability to work in a country they have lived in for over a decade. Decide now — before the deadline — what you will communicate, when, and who delivers it.

Why Immigration Counsel Has to Be a Strategic Partner

Here is the argument I keep making, and Mullin makes it better than I can.

The traditional model treats immigration counsel as a vendor: a case gets filed, a petition gets approved, an invoice gets paid. That model works when immigration is a transaction. It fails completely when immigration is a moving regulatory environment driven by litigation and executive action — which is exactly what it has become.

Consider the timeline. The decision came down June 25. Initial USCIS guidance pointed to July 1. That was superseded, then superseded again on July 10, producing two different dates for two different groups of countries, both landing within a two-week window. An employer with no standing relationship to immigration counsel spent that period trying to figure out whether it had a problem. An employer with one already knew the answer on June 26 and spent the window solving it.

The value of a strategic partnership is not that counsel knows the law better. It is structural:

• They know your workforce before the news breaks. Counsel who has already mapped your population by status can tell you in hours, not weeks, what a decision means for you specifically.
• They read the litigation, not just the outcome. Mullin‘s jurisdictional holding was foreseeable from the oral argument in April. The employers who were briefed in the spring were not surprised in June.
• They see the retention options. Reverification is not the only conversation. For employees you want to keep, there may be alternative pathways — an employment-based petition, a family-based filing, another form of relief. Those options take time to evaluate and longer to execute. They are unavailable to anyone who starts thinking about them the week authorization lapses.
• They are the privileged channel. The analysis of who is affected, what your exposure looks like, and where your I-9 files are weak is precisely the analysis you want protected. Doing that work under counsel matters.
• They keep employment and immigration counsel from working at cross-purposes. The immigration answer and the employment answer are frequently in tension. Someone has to reconcile them before HR acts, not after.

 The Real Lesson

Mullin is not really a TPS case for employers. It is a demonstration of how quickly a settled workforce assumption can stop being settled — through a jurisdictional holding in a case most HR departments had never heard of, followed by three rounds of agency guidance in three weeks.

The next one will come from somewhere else. It may be an EAD category, a visa program, a policy memo, or another decision on another docket. What will not change is the shape of the problem: a legal development lands, the operational deadline is short, and the organizations that have to start from “who do we even have?” lose the runway they needed.

Build the relationship now. Map the workforce now. Do it while it is a planning exercise rather than a crisis.

Because by the time a work authorization issue surfaces on someone’s desk, the strategic window has already closed.

I’ll be joining an outstanding panel to discuss what Mullin v. Doe means for employers and the practical steps legal and HR teams should be taking now. This communication is general information, not legal advice; employers with affected employees should consult immigration counsel about their specific circumstances. Guidance in this area is changing rapidly — verify current USCIS instructions before acting.