DHS Lets Ukraine, Sudan Deportation Protections Continue Past Deadline, With No Final Decision Set

Temporary deportation protections for more than 100,000 Ukrainians and roughly 1,800 Sudanese nationals living in the United States were due to expire at midnight Monday. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security told CBS News over the weekend that both groups would keep their status and work permits "for now," leaving a final decision for later rather than letting the designations lapse on schedule.

The announcement, made Sunday, does not resolve the underlying question. DHS said only that a determination on whether to formally extend, redesignate or terminate Temporary Protected Status for Ukraine and Sudan would "be made at the appropriate time." It is the same holding pattern the department used last month for El Salvador, whose TPS program was also allowed to continue past its scheduled end date without a public notice making the extension official.

The numbers

The scale of what is in limbo is large. More than 100,000 Ukrainians hold TPS, a figure that includes people admitted under a Biden-era humanitarian sponsorship program in addition to those who registered after Russia's 2022 invasion. Sudan's program is smaller, covering roughly 1,800 people, but it is one of the longest-running TPS designations in the country, tracing back to the late 1990s and renewed repeatedly since a 2023 civil war between Sudan's army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

Congressional pressure has built on both fronts. A bipartisan group of senators, including Democrat Tammy Duckworth and Republicans Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, pressed Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in September to grant Ukraine an 18-month extension and a redesignation that would let more recent arrivals qualify. Separately, Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine led six Senate Democratic colleagues in a letter to Mullin and Rubio dated Aug. 17 making the same case for Sudan, citing "ongoing armed conflict, catastrophic humanitarian crisis, and widespread human rights abuses" as grounds that, in their view, plainly meet the legal standard for extension and redesignation under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

How the deadline arrived

Congress created Temporary Protected Status in 1990 to shield people from deportation when their home countries are judged too dangerous for safe return, typically because of war, natural disaster or similar upheaval. Ukraine's designation dates to April 2022, shortly after Russia's full-scale invasion; the Biden administration's Department of Homeland Security extended it, along with Sudan's, for an additional 18 months in a Federal Register notice published in January 2025, setting both to run through Oct. 19, 2026 — today. A companion notice covering Sudan ran the same day.

The Trump administration has otherwise moved aggressively to wind TPS down, ending protections for more than 1 million people from more than a dozen countries, including Afghanistan, Haiti and Venezuela, over the past year and a half. Administration officials have described the program as a de facto amnesty that encourages illegal immigration. That effort cleared a significant legal hurdle in June, when the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Mullin v. Doe, holding that the Immigration and Nationality Act largely bars federal courts from second-guessing the secretary's TPS decisions on non-constitutional grounds. The ruling cleared the way for the administration to proceed with terminations affecting Somalia, South Sudan, Syria and Haiti that lower courts had blocked.

Markwayne Mullin, a former Oklahoma senator, took over as Homeland Security secretary in March after President Trump removed Kristi Noem from the post. Of the countries that still held TPS designations when the administration began winding the program down, Ukraine, Sudan and El Salvador are among the small number still outstanding, along with Lebanon, whose designation is set to expire Nov. 27.

Who is affected

For TPS holders themselves, the immediate practical stakes involve work authorization as much as deportation risk. Employers were told to treat Oct. 19, 2026, as the listed expiration date on Form I-9 and in the federal E-Verify system for TPS-holding employees from both countries, meaning the DHS statement effectively buys time for workers and employers alike while a formal notice is drafted. Families with members who arrived in the United States after the current registration cutoffs — March 2022 for some Sudanese arrivals, and various dates tied to Ukraine's 2023 re-registration period — would also be affected differently depending on whether DHS eventually redesignates either country, which would open eligibility to more recent arrivals, or simply extends the existing designation, which would not.

"Forcing their return to such cruel conditions would be the height of inhumanity."

That warning came from Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., one of four senators — alongside Murkowski, Chris Coons and Bill Cassidy — who introduced bipartisan legislation on Sept. 23 that would extend Ukraine's TPS designation by statute rather than leaving it to executive discretion. Murkowski, explaining her support for the bill, said simply that "we should not force Ukrainians who we allowed into the U.S. and who are here legally" to return to a war zone.

Reaction and what happens next

DHS has not said when it will issue a final notice for either country, and the agency's public-facing guidance pages for both designations still listed Oct. 19, 2026, as the end date as of this weekend, unchanged since early September. That leaves open the possibility of a further extension, a redesignation, or eventually a termination along the lines of what has already happened to TPS holders from a dozen other countries since 2025.

The bipartisan legislation introduced by Blumenthal, Murkowski, Coons and Cassidy remains before the Senate and would, if enacted, remove Ukraine's status from the secretary's unilateral control. Advocacy groups and Democratic lawmakers have pushed for both Ukraine and Sudan to be treated as the El Salvador designation was last month — left in place administratively while a longer-term decision is finalized. For now, that appears to be exactly what DHS has done, without saying so in a public notice or committing to a timetable for making it official.