Rob Salinas/Houston Public Media
The Trump administration has proposed a new rule that would make it harder for some immigrants to obtain legal authorization to work in the U.S., which could have a significant impact in the Houston area and across Texas.
The rule, published Friday in the Federal Register, would affect people with temporary protection to enter the country and not be deported. That includes immigrants on humanitarian parole and deferred action recipients, including those covered under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) stated, in its executive summary of the proposed rule, that the proposed changes were designed to comply with an executive order President Donald Trump issued in 2025 on the first day of his second term in office, entitled, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.”
“DHS [U.S. Department of Homeland Security] also seeks to ensure that its rules are aligned with the Administration’s efforts to reduce illegal immigration and the incentives for aliens to try to obtain immigration benefits outside of the comprehensive scheme Congress has provided for aliens to legally immigrate to the United States,” the proposed rule’s executive summary reads. “Enforcement is essential to the integrity of the immigration system.”
Gordon Quan, senior attorney with the Quan Law Group, said the new rule could be devastating to immigrants in the Houston area, particularly asylum seekers from Latin America.
“I think the logic is to discourage people from seeking refuge in the United States,” Quan said, “because if they cannot work to support their families, then they have to work illegally or starve.”
Austin-based immigration attorney Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch said it’s hard to overstate the potential effect the threat to immigrants’ work authorizations could have on their lives and those of their families.
“When you have a job, and you have an apartment and a car and a family, and you, all of a sudden, lose your work permit,” Lincoln-Goldfinch said, “some landlords will not continue to rent homes or apartments to people who don’t have work eligibility. So, somebody can face an entire disruption in their life and their ability to support themselves and their family based on a denial or even a delay of a work permit.”
Quan said several key sectors of the Houston economy also would feel the impact of the proposed rule.
“We’re facing shortages [of labor] in the area of construction, of food service, and just many basic services,” Quan said. “I was with the American Business and Immigration Coalition recently, looking at the dire need for workers who can work legally.”
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The new rule would also require that immigrants seeking renewal of their work permits must be employed by or seek employment with an employer who uses the E-Verify system, an electronic employment eligibility verification program.
“A lot of those employers probably don’t participate in E-Verify. It’s a voluntary system,” said Rehan Alimohammad, a partner in the Sugar Land office of Wong Fleming and a professor at the University of Houston Law Center’s Immigration Clinic. “And that would lead to something that employers probably don’t want to do, and maybe they just turn away the applicant instead of having to do that.”
USCIS did not respond to Houston Public Media’s request for further comment on why the proposed rule is necessary at this time.
The publication of the proposed rule in the Federal Register opens a 60-day public comment period. Lincoln-Goldfinch said she’s not optimistic that will lead to any softening of the rule before it is finalized.
“That’s based on this administration and the fact that they have demonstrated that they don’t really care what the community or experts who serve the community think about their policies or the impacts that these may have,” Lincoln-Goldfinch said, “not only on the workers, but also on the economy overall and the businesses who employ these people. They just don’t tend to respond to commentary.”
