By Jim Thomas | Sunday, 26 July 2026 12:19 PM EDT
As of Sunday, employers across healthcare, construction, hospitality, and food processing sectors are bracing for a fresh wave of workforce losses as the Trump administration moves to end Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of foreign workers following the Supreme Court’s June ruling in Mullin v. Doe.
Industry groups say TPS holders are concentrated in sectors already short on labor and that the compressed timeline of the terminations gives employers little runway to replace them.
The National Association of Home Builders noted that foreign-born workers account for more than one-third of residential construction trades and that TPS beneficiaries have helped ease the industry’s chronic shortage.
Healthcare employers have similarly warned that home health aides and nursing assistants with TPS are difficult to replace in a workforce already strained by an aging population.
The administration itself has flagged a tightening of the labor supply. An October Federal Register filing accompanying an H-2A wage rule cited a labor shortage worsened by tighter enforcement and warned of “supply shock-induced food shortages,” while acknowledging that Americans have not filled agricultural vacancies at scale.
Trump has also expanded the H-2B seasonal visa cap by roughly 65,000 for fiscal year 2026, according to a Reuters report of the Federal Register notice, to relieve employer pressure.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, held that the judicial-review bar in the TPS statute forecloses nonconstitutional challenges to a Homeland Security secretary’s decision to end a country’s designation. That cleared the administration to unwind protections for roughly 350,000 Haitians and about 6,000 Syrians.
Since the ruling, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has held Haitian work authorization together with short extensions, and on July 22 the D.C. Circuit rejected the administration’s bid to let permits lapse on July 24, keeping protections in place through at least July 27.
TPS for nationals of Ethiopia, Myanmar, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen is on a parallel track after DHS moved in early July to wind those designations down.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, sworn in March 24 after replacing Kristi Noem, has defended the terminations as consistent with the statute’s temporary design, telling CNN’s “State of the Union” that long-tenured TPS holders can pursue permanent residence or other visas if they qualify.
Business and advocacy groups counter that beneficiaries have averaged years, and in some cases decades, in the U.S. workforce and that few realistic pathways exist for most, leaving employers to absorb the loss.
For now, the immediate task is I-9 compliance as expiration dates shift.
Whether the workforce can absorb the loss will surface first in health care wards, on jobsites, and in processing plants, and then in the payroll numbers the Labor Department reports in the coming months.
