Temporary Protected Status (TPS) has dominated the foreign-born workforce headlines in recent months, and for good reason. The Supreme Court’s June 25, 2026 ruling in Mullin v. Doe cleared the way to end TPS for roughly 6,000 Syrian nationals and 350,000 Haitians, many of whom work in aging services, and TPS for El Salvador is set to terminate September 9. Many LeadingAge members are still absorbing the loss of trained staff who were already on the payroll.

TPS, however, is only one part of a system under strain at every stage. Ask a LeadingAge member how immigration policy affects them and the answer depends on which stage they are touching: foreign-born workers already in the workforce and at risk, foreign-born workers in the pipeline, or including foreign-born workers as part of future workforce planning. Here’s what that means depending on where you are on this continuum.

If you depend on foreign born workers already

Cessation of TPS isn’t the only way policy changes are reaching people already on your payroll. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) approved 63% fewer Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) renewals in the first half of FY2026 than in the same period of Fiscal Year (FY) 2025, 53,855, down from nearly 145,000. Measured against renewals submitted in the same period, the approval rate fell from 84% to 34%, and the pending-renewal backlog has more than tripled to 120,000 applications, the highest on record. If you have an exemplary employee whose work permit runs through DACA, government inaction on a routine renewal — not anything you or she did — could be what costs you that employee.

Beyond the delays, the Fifth Circuit held in January 2025 that the portions of the DACA rule conferring work authorization are unlawful. The court limited the effect of its ruling to Texas, but the district court has not yet issued the order implementing it, and how that order is written carries potential national implications.

Staff with other immigration status and work authorization may be exposed too. In May 2026, USCIS reframed adjustment of status—the process by which someone already on your payroll applies for a green card without leaving the country—as an extraordinary act of discretion rather than a standard procedure, with a clear preference for sending applicants abroad to finish the process instead. Layer on tightened I-9 audit standards and new signature-enforcement rules that can void a filing after the fact, and the end of automatic Employment Authorization Document extensions, and every current employee’s paperwork is now a compliance risk it wasn’t two years ago.

If you have workers in the pipeline

Consider a home health agency in rural Iowa with a registered nurse candidate from Jamaica, approved on paper and ready to join the staff. Starting January 21, 2026, immigrant visa issuance had been suspended for nationals of 75 countries, Jamaica among them, on generalized public charge grounds. Consular officers were instructed to keep interviewing applicants and simply not issue the visa — so she could clear every step of the process and still have nothing to show for it. On August 21, a federal court vacated that policy, finding that it exceeded the Secretary of State’s authority and violated the Immigration and Nationality Act’s bar on nationality discrimination. Five days later, the State Department postponed immigrant visa interviews worldwide — this time for all nationalities, attributed to a global training initiative on public charge screening, with no announced end date. Our Jamaican nurse may have cleared her interview and but received her visa; that ban is now vacated, but  now she can’t get an interview should further action be needed.

If you’re planning for future need

 A tighter pipeline doesn’t only affect employers currently using it. Immigrant workers make up 30% of the direct care workforce providing long-term services and supports, a share that has grown steadily for over a decade because domestic recruitment alone hasn’t kept pace with rising demand. When existing employees lose work authorization or visa candidates are stuck mid-process, the need for care doesn’t disappear. Every provider, including the ones with zero foreign-born staff today, ends up competing for the same smaller pool of workers.

The system meant to relieve that pressure wasn’t built with this sector in mind. For example, registered nurses fit the EB-3 professional subcategory and appear on Schedule A, the federal shortage-occupation list that lets employers skip the recruitment stage of the green card process- but even with that advantage their cases take years to conclude. Certified nursing assistants and home health aides however, are eligible for EB-3 visas, but not on Schedule A, which hasn’t been meaningfully updated since 1991.  Because they fall into EB-3’s “other workers” subcategory, capped at 10,000 visas per year worldwide regardless of demand, visas for these roles can be exceedingly difficult to obtain. The occupations this sector needs most have the narrowest door.

A proposed Department of Labor rule would narrow it further. The rule would raise the four prevailing wage tiers from roughly the 17th–67th percentiles of federal wage survey data to the 34th–88th, and those wage determinations are set by occupation and geography across all industries combined. A skilled nursing facility recruiting an RN is benchmarked against the same wage distribution as the hospital across town — two settings that may have very different financial realities.

The bottom line

Every LeadingAge member’s workforce depends at least in part on our immigration system: current staff, workers in process, and the system meant to supply tomorrow’s workforce. Congress can fix this, but only if members of Congress hear it from the providers living it.

Two things you can do, and the resources we have built to help you:

Invite your representative or senators to visit. Nothing moves a legislator like standing in a building where the staffing math is visible. We can help you extend the invitation, prepare talking points, and follow up.

Tell us what you’re seeing. If you’ve lost staff to a TPS termination, watched a DACA renewal stall, or had a candidate frozen mid-process, that account is what makes the case on Capitol Hill concrete.

Contact Associate Director for Immigration Advancement Shane Myers at Smyers@leadingage.org, or see the Immigration Advancement Project: Advocacy Resources page.