Temporary Protected Status for Haitian nationals will almost certainly end on or about July 27, and no lower federal court is going to stop it, the Commonwealth’s senior refugee legal official told CTN this week, an assessment that closes the last door for roughly 350,000 Haitians nationwide, more than 46,000 of them in Massachusetts.
Susan Church, Chief Operating Officer and Legal Adviser at the Massachusetts Office for Refugees and Immigrants, delivered that judgment in an interview conducted as Haitian families across Boston, Brockton, Randolph, and Mattapan wait on a date that has moved four times in six weeks.
Church has spent decades in Massachusetts immigration courtrooms and now oversees the state agency that runs the Commonwealth’s legal services network for immigrant families. Asked whether the lower courts might still find a way to buy families more time, a hope circulating widely in the diaspora, and one that a number of attorneys in the community have been actively repeating — she did not soften it.
“I mean, unfortunately, I hate to be the person with bad news, but I do not think that the lower courts are going to do anything other than certify the judge’s opinion and docket the opinion and put it into effect, which means that TPS is very likely to end on July 27th.”
The finding matters because of who is saying it. Church is not an advocate speaking for a campaign or a private attorney serving a client. She runs the state’s own legal infrastructure for exactly the population in question — and her office has spent eighteen months building the case that Haitians should keep this status.
Her conclusion is that the litigation is over, that Congress is the only surviving route, and that the Senate has not moved.
What follows is what she told CTN about the date, the mechanism, the remedies still available to workers who are fired early, and what she thinks families should be doing with the days that remain.
“That’s how our constitution works”
Pressed again — because CTN wanted the answer unambiguous for viewers who are being told otherwise — Church did not move.
“I mean, generally, the Supreme Court speaks, and the lower courts follow what the Supreme Court says. That’s how our constitution works. That’s how our federal government works. It would be — I never want to say never, because in this day and age we don’t know how to predict things anymore — but I think it’s highly unlikely that the relief would come through the courts.”
The Massachusetts figure — more than 45,000 Haitian TPS holders — comes from FWD.us. Nationally, the number is roughly 350,000. For all of them, Susan Church’s assessment closes a door that has stayed open, barely, since the Trump administration first moved against the designation.
Church did not leave viewers without a list of things to do:
- Meet with a licensed immigration attorney or a DOJ-accredited representative now — not on July 27, not after. Susan Church called a legal consultation the single most important action any Haitian TPS holder can take today.
- Your work permit is valid through at least July 24. USCIS has extended TPS-related Employment Authorization Documents for Haitian nationals to that date, regardless of what is printed on the card.
- Your employer cannot lawfully fire you before that date because of the Supreme Court ruling. The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office has told employers not to preemptively terminate workers. If it has already happened, you can file a complaint with the AG.
- ORI’s Legal Help Desk connects people to vetted attorneys. The Massachusetts Access to Counsel Initiative intake line is 508-505-4588 for income-eligible people facing immigration court.
- Prepare your family — caregiver affidavit, children’s passports, and power of attorney. CTN covers each in a companion piece.
Why July 27, and why it isn’t the date on your work permit
Two dates are circulating in the community right now, and they keep getting confused. They are different things.
July 24 is an administrative date. It is the expiration date USCIS has assigned to TPS-related Employment Authorization Documents for Haitian nationals — Forms I-766 in categories A12 and C19 — while the litigation finishes. It is not the first such date. USCIS used July 1 as a placeholder, replaced it with July 10, and on July 10 replaced that with July 24. The employment law firm Littler, which tracks these updates for employers, noted that further changes to the date may occur. Employers must enter “as per court order” in Section 1 of the Form I-9 and the current date in Section 2.
July 27 is a procedural date, and it is the one the Chief Operating Officer and Legal Advisor of the Office for Refugees and Immigrants, Susan Church, was describing.
The Supreme Court issued its opinion in Mullin v. Doe on June 25, 2026. But an opinion is not the end of a case. Under the Supreme Court’s Rule 45, the Clerk does not send the lower court a certified copy of the judgment on the day the opinion comes out. The Clerk waits — 32 days — because the losing side has 25 days to ask the Court to reconsider. Only when that window closes does the paperwork travel down to the courts below, which then have to conform their own orders to what the Supreme Court said.
June 25 plus 32 days is July 27.
Susan Church described it in the interview almost exactly as the rule is written: “the rules take effect when the Supreme Court certifies its actual opinion that they have already issued. So they issue the opinion in writing and then for some reason 32 days go by, and then the Supreme Court says, ‘Yep, this is the correct opinion. It’s certified.’ And that’s when it takes effect.”
That is why she used the word “approximately.” The mechanics run through the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then down to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where Judge Ana C. Reyes’s February 2 order staying the termination remains in effect in Miot v. Trump. The district court has to dissolve it. That could land on July 27; it could land a few days before or after. What Susan Church is saying is that it will land, and that no judge in that chain has the discretion to refuse.
TPS beneficiaries should not treat July 24 and July 27 as interchangeable. The first governs whether you can legally work. The second governs whether you have status at all. USCIS could revise July 24 again before it arrives. The authoritative source is the USCIS TPS Haiti page, and CTN recommends checking it directly rather than relying on social media.
Precision matters here because the ruling is being described inaccurately across the diaspora.
Mullin v. Doe was decided 6-3 on June 25, 2026, consolidating the Haiti case (Trump v. Miot) and the Syria case. The Court did not rule that ending TPS for Haiti was a good, lawful, or well-reasoned idea. It never reached that question.
What the Court held is narrower and, for practical purposes, worse. It held that 8 U.S.C. § 1254a(b)(5)(A) — the judicial-review bar written into the TPS statute itself in 1990 — forecloses non-constitutional challenges to a DHS Secretary’s TPS determinations. That means the arbitrary-and-capricious argument is gone. The failure-to-consult argument is gone. The procedural APA arguments are gone. The courts, the Supreme Court said, do not get to look.
The plaintiffs also raised an equal protection claim, the only constitutional avenue that survives the review bar. The Court found they were unlikely to succeed on it, concluding that the statements by President Trump and then-Secretary Kristi Noem that the plaintiffs cited were insufficient to show that race was a motivating factor in the termination decision.
That is the ruling. It reversed the lower-court orders that had been blocking terminations, and it removed the legal theory that had been blocking terminations for Burma, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Yemen, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Nepal as well. Haiti was the largest domino, but it was not the only one.
This is why Susan Church’s assessment is not pessimistic. It is arithmetic. There is no argument left for a district judge to rule on.
The one road still open runs through the Senate
Church did point to something — and CTN wants to be careful about how it is characterized, because false hope has a cost.
“However, there is a movement within Congress for essentially to get TPS reinstated by petition in Congress. There are employers who are starting to speak up because this is devastating to many employers, particularly in health care and related fields.”
The legislative record is real, and it is further along than most people realize. On March 28, 2026, Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s discharge petition hit the 218-signature threshold — the procedural device that wrenches a bill out of the Speaker’s hands and forces a floor vote. On April 16, the House passed H.R. 1689, sponsored by Rep. Laura Gillen of New York, by a vote of 224-204, with Republican votes. The bill directs DHS to designate Haiti for TPS and would extend protections into January 2029. Then it stopped.
The Senate companion, S. 4814, was introduced in June by Sens. Ed Markey and Lisa Blunt Rochester alongside Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and sixteen additional colleagues. As of the most recent public counts, no Senate Republicans have signed on as cosponsors. It has not received a vote. Reporting has indicated President Trump would veto the bill if it reached his desk.
Church’s read on where the pressure might actually come from is worth sitting with, because it is not a legal read — it is a labor-market read.
“We just know how important Haitians are to Massachusetts, to our hospitals, to our — as personal care assistants. They work in all the industries in our state. So, employers know this too. So there is certainly public pressure going on to try to get the federal government to reverse this opinion, and that seems to me the most likely pathway for anything to happen.”
Employers are already jumping the gun
Some Massachusetts employers have already cut Haitian workers loose — before any termination took effect, in defiance of both the AG’s guidance and the plain fact that these workers remain authorized. GBH News reported that Marie Fleurival, a Massachusetts TPS holder, was told by her employer, Enclave of Franklin, an assisted living facility, that her last day would be July 10.
Governor Maura Healey has been unambiguous. “This ruling has not yet taken effect, first of all, and each person who has TPS has their own unique circumstance,” she told GBH. “Employers should not preemptively lay off anyone or terminate anyone until they understand what the situation is for their respective employee.”
Church said ORI has trained roughly 800 employers on the rules and when termination is permitted. Asked what a worker fired early can do, she was realistic about the size of the remedy but clear that one exists.
“I do think that it is illegal for employers to prematurely terminate people… I would say you could contact the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office and file a complaint for discrimination for premature termination. I do think that you know you’re talking low damages legally because it’s like a week or two early termination, but it is something you could challenge.”
She was skeptical that a fired worker could realistically be reinstated in time for the days remaining. But the complaint is on the record, and a pattern of complaints is how enforcement starts.
One hard piece of news for anyone already laid off: unemployment benefits are almost certainly unavailable once work authorization lapses. “The idea of unemployment is you are available to work, you can work, but right now you don’t have a job,” Church explained. “And unfortunately, if you don’t have work authorization, it’s difficult to get unemployment.”
“Hope for a miracle. But prepare.”
Asked at the end of the interview what she most wanted CTN’s viewers to understand, the Chief Operating Officer and Legal Advisor of the Office for Refugees and Immigrants gave an answer that was neither a lawyer’s nor a bureaucrat’s.
“I think a lot of people are still hoping for a miracle. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Keep hoping for a miracle. We all know what a horrible economic and emotional blow this is to your families and to our state, to be honest with you. But prepare, you know, you can do both. You can hope for a miracle, but prepare for the worst. And I would just urge people to do both.”
Then, the practical version:
“And get a good lawyer. Now, if you have not met with a good lawyer, you’ve just been renewing your TPS all these years, and you didn’t think you’d ever need it, now is the time to get a good lawyer.”
That last sentence describes almost the entire community. For sixteen years — since the 2010 earthquake — Haitian TPS has functioned as a renewal, a form, a fee, a stamp. Not a case. Not something requiring a lawyer. An enormous number of families in Boston, Brockton, Randolph, Everett, and Mattapan have never had a legal consultation, because they never needed one.
They need one now, and there are perhaps ten days left.
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