Every TPS action since 1994: 292 Federal Register notices, 27 countries, 32 years

Every TPS action since 1994: 292 Federal Register notices, 27 countries, 32 years

Temporary Protected Status has been granted, extended, and taken away for more than thirty years, one Federal Register notice at a time. Each notice is public. Together, they have never been public as a single record — and that matters, because the U.S. government publishes only what is true today. When a designation ends, the notice that created it does not move to an archive page; it simply stops being the current answer.

This is that record, assembled: every TPS designation, extension, redesignation and termination published between 1994 and 2026, by country, with each row linked to the Federal Register document that published it. You can check any line against the primary source in one click.

The clearest thing in the data: 2025 saw 13 TPS termination notices — more than any other year on record, and more than 2018 (5), 2023 (4) and 2016 (3) combined. Nothing in the previous three decades resembles it.

How to read this — and the mistake that matters

A termination notice here does not mean that country’s TPS has ended today.

This dataset records what DHS published. It does not record what is currently in force, and for the recent years those are very different things. Several 2025 and 2026 terminations were stayed, enjoined, or extended by court order, and work permits for some of those countries remain valid under those orders. The Supreme Court’s June 25, 2026 ruling in Mullin v. Doe changed the litigation picture again, and the dates employers must use on Form I-9 moved twice in July 2026 alone.

If you hold TPS, or you are advising someone who does, this page is history — not your status. For your status:

• Check your country’s page on USCIS Temporary Protected Status.
• See our dated snapshot of TPS work-permit status by country, which tracks what is actually in force and the current I-9 dates.
• Follow the cases in our TPS termination litigation tracker.

Why the record starts in 1994

TPS was created by the Immigration Act of 1990 (§ 244 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1254a), and the first designations were made in 1991. The Federal Register’s full-text archive begins in 1994, so notices published before then are not retrievable through the API this dataset is built from. The record here is complete from 1994 forward; it is not the complete history of the program, and we would rather say so than imply a completeness we cannot verify.

Method

Every row is one Federal Register document, retrieved through the Federal Register’s public full-text API. Country and action are read from the document’s own title and metadata; a single notice can carry more than one action (a redesignation is frequently also an extension), so the action counts exceed the document count. Notices that matched the search but are not TPS actions were excluded rather than guessed at, and a small number of documents that could not be classified confidently are marked as such rather than being forced into a category.

The dataset is rebuilt with build_tps_designation_history.py, and its _meta block carries the source, the build date, and the archive floor. Numbers on this page are rendered from the dataset, not typed into the prose.

Use it

The full dataset is free to download as JSON and free to use with attribution to MigrantUSA. If you are a journalist, researcher, or legal-aid organization and you need a cut of this we have not published — by country, by administration, by action type — the underlying data is all there, and the source for every row is one click away.

This is general information, not legal advice. TPS status and work authorization are changing quickly and are specific to your country and your case. Consult an immigration attorney or an accredited legal-aid provider about your situation.