SHRM26 Debrief · Legal & Compliant HR · #1015

Compliance Chaos: I-9, E-Verify, and Workforce Continuity in 2026

with John Mazzeo

▶ Watch on the SHRM portal ~82 min, distilled

Form I-9E-VerifyTPS terminations

"It's a living, breathing document. It's changing, and it also has operational impacts up and down the chain."

What it was about

I-9 and E-Verify aren't static regulatory forms. They're living, operational tools for workforce continuity, and in 2026's shifting immigration enforcement environment, HR must build proactive, counsel-guided processes to track expiring work authorizations instead of reacting to raids or terminations after the fact.

By the numbers

more than two and a half million individuals

foreign nationals who have lost work authorization in the US to date, primarily TPS beneficiaries and parolees

51% match

E-Verify's identity-matching threshold, per a 2021 Office of Inspector General report

14 months

USCIS quarterly-reported EAD processing wait time for parolees

Key notes

Build (or ask your electronic I-9 vendor to build) a recurring process to pull and review the E-Verify status change/EAD revocation report every two weeks, since the government now treats employer awareness of a revoked EAD as evidence of knowing violations.
Set a hold/filter date (e.g., July 1st) in your I-9 system to identify employees on TPS-related EADs under litigation so you can quickly act if a court ruling suddenly ends their work authorization.
Do not take adverse action (bad performance reviews, warnings, demotions) against employees whose work authorization is set to expire in the future — only act on actual loss of authorization, not anticipated loss.

The contrarian takeSome labor-market articles (Bloomberg, Financial Times) have suggested that removing roughly 2.5 million people from the workforce due to lost work authorization actually helped stabilize certain economic issues stemming from other administration policies. It's a counterintuitive read on immigration enforcement's economic effect, and the speaker explicitly flagged that he couldn't personally verify it.

Take this back Monday

Do this for your team

Set up a biweekly E-Verify status-change/EAD-revocation report review, and name an escalation owner before a crisis hits.

Say this in your next leadership meeting

I-9 and E-Verify aren't paperwork anymore — with 2.5M+ work authorizations lost so far, we need a proactive tracking process, not a reactive one.

Watch out for

Treating E-Verify and Form I-9 as the same thing, or as substitutes for each other, when E-Verify is only a complement to the I-9.
Asking new hires for specific documents (e.g., demanding a Social Security card or LPR card) instead of letting the employee choose which acceptable documents to present — this is illegal document abuse under DOJ's IER rules.
Assuming an EAD with a pending renewal approval notice in hand means the employee can keep working — legally they cannot without the physical/valid card or an approved extension.

Fun fact · John Mazzeo

Before advising employers on immigration compliance, he was a trial attorney prosecuting worksite enforcement cases for ICE.

If this landed, see these

↳ Go deeperEmployers in the Hot Seat: Surviving Form I-9 Audits and Enforcement in Trump 2.0Same I-9 domain, leveled up: multi-agency audit survival tactics beyond EAD tracking alone.⇄ The counterpointRaid Readiness: Preparing Your Workforce for ICE Worksite ActionsComplicates the urgency: most ICE encounters are administrative paperwork, not the raids everyone fears.✦ The unexpected oneBuilding an AI-Enabled Recruiting TeamSame underused-tool problem, different function: AI recruiting features already sit unused in your stack.