The Trump administration has been aggressively terminating a variety of humanitarian programs for immigrants for weeks now. After many court challenges, employers are now finally needing to face the realities of the sudden loss of labor. Confusion swirls, however, around exactly who can and cannot work, given that most of the affected immigrants are holding valid employment authorization documents.

After business hours on June 27, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that it was finally providing a report to employers about which of their employees has had a “status change” in work authorization—but only those employers enrolled in E-Verify and only as to employees whose employment authorization was verified by E-Verify. Employers that are manually entering E-Verify queries can access the required report through the account. For those employers that rely on electronic I-9 vendors to submit E-Verify queries, the report must be obtained from the vendor. It is important to note that, shockingly, the report does not include names. It only includes A# numbers. Some vendors have been able to add names to the report and others have not. Employers need to match the A# numbers to employee names to determine who they need to contact for further follow up.

Once you have the report and the names, the next step is to determine whether the Form I-9 needs to be updated. Because the report is generated from A# numbers, all it is saying is that the employee had a status change on one of the employment authorization documents. It does not mean that the document that has been changed is the same one that the employee presented at the time of hire. Many individuals have more than one employment authorization document based on different applications. The staffing firm needs to determine which document was presented at time of hire and enter the document number into the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services status tool at uscis.gov. If it says that the card was produced or delivered, it remains valid and no further update is required for the Form I-9; the employee may continue to work. If, instead, it says that the card has been revoked, then the employer must meet with the employee to reverify the employment authorization in Supplement B of Form I-9. The employee must be provided with the chance to present some other document from the list of acceptable documents that establish employment authorization—if the employee does not have any, they must be terminated.

Employers that are not enrolled in E-Verify will not receive any report of employee status changes. At a minimum, these employers should notify all employees that if they have notification that their employment status has changed, they are obligated to report it to the employer, and that failure to do so would be basis for termination. Staffing firms could take the extra step of checking the status of documents presented to establish identity and employment authorization, as outlined above, but this could be administratively prohibitive given that the firm would not have a streamlined report of who should be checked.