Temporary Protected Status holders from El Salvador, Sudan and Ukraine will stay on a one-year work permit clock, applied retroactively, after a federal judge in Boston declined to pause it. The same five-page order handed asylum applicants a partial win. Ruling on Aug. 5 in Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts v. USCIS, case 1:26-cv-13038 in the District of Massachusetts, Judge Nathaniel Gorton denied a stay of USCIS's one-year cap on TPS work authorization under H.R.1 while granting limited relief against the law's new Annual Asylum Fee provisions [1][2]. Legal summaries of the August order confirm the mixed holding: the court concluded the plaintiffs were not likely to succeed on the work-permit claims and that USCIS was carrying out requirements Congress enacted through H.R.1, while narrowing earlier relief to the asylum-fee provisions [3][4].
Start with the people who lost. H.R.1 capped TPS-based employment authorization documents, the cards known as EADs, at one year, and USCIS applied that cap retroactively, reaching permits already in the hands of TPS holders from El Salvador, Sudan and Ukraine [2]. The plaintiffs asked Gorton to stay that policy while their challenge proceeds. He refused, concluding they "haven't shown they're likely to succeed" on the claim [1][2]. For a TPS holder the practical translation is blunt: the permit in your wallet now expires on the capped clock, not on the schedule you planned your job, your lease and your family's budget around. A work permit is the document standing between a lawfully present person and a lost paycheck, and for these three countries' TPS populations the clock now belongs to the government, not the card.
The asylum side of the case went the other way. Gorton granted limited relief against H.R.1's new Annual Asylum Fee provisions, which attach a recurring yearly charge to the asylum process [1][2]. For now, asylum applicants covered by the order are spared that fee while the litigation continues. The order is mixed in the most literal sense: the same judge, on the same day, found one piece of the government's H.R.1 implementation worth pausing and another piece likely to survive.
This case is distinct from the Haiti TPS litigation we have been following since July. Different plaintiffs are challenging a different slice of the TPS wind-down, and nothing Gorton ruled reaches the Haitian docket directly. The thread connecting them is H.R.1's one-year EAD cap itself. When we reported in late July on Haitian TPS holders watching their work permits expire, the mechanism was this same capped clock, there applied to Haiti, here applied retroactively to Salvadoran, Sudanese and Ukrainian TPS holders. One statute is producing parallel lawsuits in parallel courtrooms, and so far the cap is surviving them.
A denied stay is not a final judgment. Gorton's order runs five pages, resolves only the preliminary posture, and leaves the merits of both challenges alive [1][2]. The asymmetry is in who absorbs the wait. Asylum applicants hold their reprieve while the case is argued. TPS holders get the opposite arrangement: their permits run out on the government's schedule unless the plaintiffs eventually win, and a work authorization restored in 2027 does not retroactively pay the rent that came due in 2026.
