DHS Lets the INA 244(b)(3)(C) Determination Deadline Pass for El Salvador TPS, Leaving Termination and Automatic Extension in Conflict

July 11, 2026 was the statutory deadline for DHS to determine whether conditions still supported Temporary Protected Status for El Salvador, a designation in place since 2001. DHS published nothing. The designation was then treated as terminating on September 9, 2026 — a date every source cited here reports prospectively, as scheduled rather than completed.

The statutory mechanism is the finding. Under INA § 244(b)(3)(C), at least 60 days before a designation expires the Secretary must “review conditions in the country and determine whether they still support the designation.” If the Secretary does not determine that conditions no longer support it, “the period of designation is extended for an additional 6 months” — or, at the Secretary’s discretion, 12 or 18.

No determination extending or terminating El Salvador’s designation appeared in the Federal Register. On the statute’s own terms, silence is not a termination; silence is an extension. Yet USCIS confirmed the September 9 termination date in an August 12 update.

So two readings of the same non-event sit in direct conflict: the agency treats its failure to act as letting the designation lapse, while the statute treats failure to act as extending it by operation of law. Nothing has resolved that. The reporting describes it as a live question requiring individual legal analysis — which is to say roughly 232,000 people must each decide, without an answer, whether they are lawfully present.

Why no one can get an answer is the second half. On June 25, 2026 the Supreme Court held in Mullin v. Doe that federal courts are barred by statute from reviewing nonconstitutional challenges to the Secretary’s decisions to designate, terminate, or extend TPS. An APA claim that DHS failed to follow § 244(b)(3)(C) is precisely a nonconstitutional challenge. The ordinary remedy for an agency ignoring a statutory deadline — sue and make it comply — was closed five weeks before the deadline was missed.

That sequence is the structure worth recording. Review-stripping does not merely change who wins; it changes what a procedural requirement is. A deadline that no one may enforce stops functioning as a constraint on the agency and becomes an instruction the agency may decline to follow at no cost. The requirement remains on the books, unrepealed and inoperative.

This corpus tracks the same instrument across designations: Venezuela (Ninth Circuit found termination unlawful, January), Yemen (February), Haiti and Syria (the Mullin case itself), Ethiopia (August). El Salvador is the case where the mechanism runs without even the pretense of a determination.

On September 8, the day before termination, 50 Hispanic Pentecostal bishops representing more than 21,000 congregations gathered in Washington to urge immigration protections — a constituency usually counted in the administration’s column, publicly opposing the posture.

Status: disputed, and dated to the deadline rather than the termination. This entry is filed at 2026-07-11, the missed determination deadline, because that is the act — or non-act — the sources actually document. It was first drafted at 2026-09-09 and the mechanical gate caught the error: every source predates September 9, so all of them describe the termination as scheduled, and none reports it as completed. Given that the statute’s automatic-extension provision points the other way, whether the designation in fact terminated on September 9 is precisely what is unresolved — writing it as a completed act would have decided by assertion the question this entry exists to record. Status is disputed until a post-September-9 source or a Federal Register publication settles it.

Sourcing note. The § 244(b)(3)(C) requirement and its automatic-extension consequence, the missed July 11 deadline, the absence of any Federal Register publication, the September 9 date, the 2001 origin of the designation, and the ~232,000 figure are from Texas Law and Refugee Services, corroborated on the termination date and the missing determination by LeadingAge, Nevada Current, and the Immigration Policy Tracking Project. The statute itself was not pulled — the quoted language is as rendered by TXLRS and should be checked against 8 U.S.C. § 1254a before being quoted in print. Beneficiary counts vary by source (170,000 and 232,000 both appear); the higher figure is described as “eligible beneficiaries,” a different denominator from current holders, and neither was traced to a USCIS table — per corpus discipline that number should be parsed from the agency’s own data rather than inherited. The bishops’ gathering, the 50-bishop and 21,000-congregation figures are from Religion News Service, whose full article was not read; the capture ledger’s own fact-check correctly flagged that its “200,000+ affected” line was supplied from context rather than the source and removed it. Whether DHS has since published anything, and whether any litigant has tested the automatic-extension reading despite Mullin, is not established here and is the obvious follow-up.