HR Grapevine features Loren Locke discussing implications for Walmart employees following a Supreme Court decision.
From the Article
"Employers like Walmart have no choice but to stop employing workers who lack US work authorization. But it is tricky to comply when they have a large number of current employees whose work permits are getting cancelled prematurely."
Locke Immigration Law's Take
HR Grapevine's coverage of the post-SCOTUS Walmart situation puts the same Loren quote in the right context for HR professionals: "Employers like Walmart have no choice but to stop employing workers who lack US work authorization. But it is tricky to comply when they have a large number of current employees whose work permits are getting cancelled prematurely." For HR teams managing employer compliance, the trickiness is real — the standard I-9 reverification cycle isn't designed for the volume or speed of mass status changes that CHNV parole revocations and TPS expirations are now generating.
The compliance question is operational. When a worker's EAD is revoked before its printed expiration date, the employer's obligation to terminate or place on unpaid leave is immediate, but the employer's knowledge of the revocation isn't automatic. USCIS does not push EAD revocation notices to employers. The systems most HR teams use (E-Verify, periodic I-9 audits) catch the issue at hire and at re-verification, not when a status change happens mid-employment. For employers with large status-conditional workforces, the operational gap is a real legal risk: continuing to pay a worker after their authorization has lapsed exposes the employer to civil and (in patterned cases) criminal sanctions, even when the lapse was administrative.
The HR-professional playbook we're now recommending: maintain a status-conditional-workforce roster with per-employee expiration dates pulled from the underlying authorization (not from the EAD card date, which doesn't always reflect mid-period revocations); subscribe to USCIS policy alerts for the categories represented in your workforce (CHNV, TPS-by-country, parolee categories); build a rapid-response process so that when a category-wide change is announced, HR can identify affected employees within the same business day; and keep immigration counsel reachable for ambiguous cases where individual revocation hasn't been confirmed but is implied. The cost of these systems is small relative to the legal exposure of getting the timing wrong.
Key Takeaways
- For HR teams, the compliance "trickiness" is operational: standard I-9 reverification cycles aren't designed for the volume or speed of mass status changes from CHNV revocation and TPS expiration.
- USCIS does not push EAD revocation notices to employers — knowledge gap is the structural risk for HR teams managing status-conditional workforces.
- Continuing to pay a worker after authorization lapses exposes the employer to civil and (in patterned cases) criminal sanctions, even when the lapse was administrative rather than fraudulent.
- Recommended HR systems: status-conditional roster with per-employee expiration dates from underlying authorization (not just EAD card dates); USCIS policy alert subscriptions; same-day affected-employee identification process.
- Cost of these systems is small relative to the legal exposure of mistiming a termination or re-verification.