The call usually starts the same way. A Montana business owner — recently, the owner of a car dealership — has a worker he cannot afford to lose. The worker carries a government-issued work permit; the I-9 was done correctly; he has been reliable for months or years. Then, through a translator or a coworker, the worker mentions that he has a hearing coming up in immigration court. The owner’s questions come fast: Are we about to lose him? Is he about to be deported? Are we in trouble for employing him? Should we be doing something?
This guide answers those questions. It is written for employers, not lawyers, and it draws on a real consultation — identifying details changed — in which a dealership brought us exactly this problem and asked us to review the worker’s complete immigration court file, roughly 220 pages. What we found in that file is worth understanding, because it is close to the most common outcome when a worker in this situation has filed papers without a lawyer.
The Short Answers
No, you are not about to lose him — not this year, and very likely not next year either. No, a hearing notice is not a deportation notice. No, you are not in trouble: an unexpired work permit is exactly what the I-9 rules ask of you, and nothing about a pending court case restricts his employment. And yes, there is one thing worth doing. It costs nothing, and it appears near the end of this guide.
The rest explains why those answers are true, because the explanation is what lets you stop worrying about the wrong things and pay attention to the right one.
What the Work Permit Actually Is
The card in your employee’s wallet is an Employment Authorization Document — an EAD. We explain what an EAD is and who can get one in a separate guide, but the short version is that EADs are issued in categories, and the category code printed on the card tells you the basis. The code C08 means the holder has a pending asylum application. Congress decided decades ago that people whose asylum cases are pending — cases that take years through no fault of the applicant — should be able to work lawfully while they wait.
Three things about that card matter to an employer. First, it is a List A document for I-9 purposes: an unexpired EAD establishes identity and work authorization by itself, and an employer may not demand additional or different documents. Asking for “backup” paperwork because you know the worker has a court case is the kind of documentary practice the Justice Department’s Immigrant and Employee Rights Section pursues as discrimination. Second, the card may be valid for a long time: for about two years ending in late 2025, USCIS issued asylum-based EADs valid for five years, so many workers — including the mechanic in our consultation, whose card runs into 2029 — hold long-dated cards. Cards issued now carry 18-month validity.
Third, expiration now takes planning. Until late 2025, a timely renewal automatically extended the old card for many months; that automatic extension was eliminated for renewals filed on or after October 30, 2025. Today the practical rule is simple: the new card must be in hand before the old one expires, so the renewal should be filed as early as the rules allow, and the expiration date belongs on your bookkeeper’s calendar the day the worker is hired. One more recent wrinkle worth knowing about: since 2025, asylum applicants owe a $100 annual fee while their application is pending, and nonpayment can now cost them the application — and with it, the work permit. A worker who does not know about that fee can lose everything by accident. It is a question worth making sure his lawyer, not you, is asking.
What the Hearing Actually Is
Your employee is in removal proceedings — the formal court process, run by the Justice Department’s immigration courts, that decides whether a person may remain in the United States. For workers who crossed the border during the high-crossing years and asked for protection, this is the normal posture, not an emergency: the government issued a charging document called a Notice to Appear, the worker filed an asylum application as his defense, and the case entered a queue that now holds roughly 3.5 million pending cases nationally.
Immigration court hearings come in two kinds, and the difference is everything. A master calendar hearing is a scheduling conference. It lasts minutes. The judge confirms the charges, takes pleadings, checks that applications are on file, and sets the next date. Nobody testifies, and nobody is deported at a master calendar hearing. When your worker says he “has court,” this is almost always what he means. In the dealership consultation, the hearing that had everyone worried turned out to be a master calendar hearing more than five months away — and we confirmed the date, the judge, and the courtroom in minutes, using only the worker’s file number, on the immigration court’s free public case-information system.
(That system, at acis.eoir.justice.gov, is public: anyone with the worker’s nine-digit A-number and country can check the next hearing date. If your worker shows you his hearing notice, the date can be verified the same day.)
An individual hearing is the trial — testimony, evidence, cross-examination by the government’s attorney, and a decision. Given today’s backlogs, the individual hearing typically lands a year or more after the master calendar stage, sometimes several. An unfavorable decision can be appealed, which adds more time. And through all of it — every continuance, every year of waiting, the appeal if there is one — a valid EAD keeps working. The work permit does not die with a hearing date.
The flowchart below shows the whole arc.
What We Found When We Opened the File
The dealership did the smart thing: rather than guessing, they had the worker gather everything he had filed and asked us to review it. Here is what roughly 220 pages showed — and, again, this is the most common story we see.
The application was not prepared by a lawyer. It was assembled by a paid document preparer two thousand miles away — what Spanish-speaking communities call a notario. Only attorneys and certain accredited representatives may lawfully represent people in immigration court; document preparers may type forms, nothing more, and the immigration courts run a fraud program aimed at the ones who cross that line. To this preparer’s credit, she signed the form’s preparer section, which the dishonest ones never do. And the packet was, by notario standards, organized: a table of contents, translations, exhibits in order. On the scale we use internally — where the worst filings we see say nothing but “I want a better life” — this one rated a six, maybe a seven, out of ten.
The technical defects were everywhere once you knew where to look. The form’s most important questions were answered only with “please refer to the attached documents.” The translations were machine work, with errors a judge will notice. The two witness statements were word-for-word identical photocopies of each other with the names swapped — real witnesses, with real knowledge, packaged so badly that a government attorney could use their own statements to attack the whole file.
The underlying claim was real — and better documented than most. The worker had been a genuine political activist in his home country. When he was beaten by government-aligned groups for it, he went to a clinic the same day and filed a criminal complaint with the prosecutor’s office the same day, and both documents were in the packet. Contemporaneous corroboration of that kind is exactly what fabricated claims never have. A competently rebuilt version of this case is a claim worth taking to trial.
And one problem was invisible to everyone but a lawyer. Before reaching the United States, the family had lived for years in a third country, where a child was born. Asylum law contains a bar — “firm resettlement” — for people who received an offer of a permanent home somewhere else along the way. Whether it applies here turns on facts nobody had ever asked the family about, because no one with legal training had ever read the file. The preparer did not miss it out of carelessness; she missed it because spotting it requires knowing the law, not knowing the forms. That single unexamined issue is the difference between a case that wins and a case that collapses at trial — and it is why “the paperwork was filed” is not the same as “the case is handled.”
If you want to understand what a properly built asylum case involves — including what it takes to repair one filed badly — our complete guide to asylum walks through the entire process.
The Trap That Actually Costs Cases
Here is the one urgent thing, and it is not the hearing. Immigration court notices travel by ordinary mail to the address on file with the court. A worker who moves — and workers move — must file a specific change-of-address form, Form EOIR-33, with the court itself, within five days of the move. Telling USCIS, the post office, or his employer does not do it; the court and USCIS keep entirely separate address records, and we have written before about how badly address changes can go even when the right agency is told. If a hearing notice goes to an old address and the worker misses court, the judge can order him removed in his absence — that day, no trial, with a ten-year bar on most forms of relief stacked on top.
In the file we reviewed, the family had moved across state lines and the change-of-address forms were still sitting in the packet, blank. That blank form was the single most dangerous thing in 220 pages. So if you remember one practical takeaway from this guide: the most valuable thing your worker can confirm this week is that the immigration court has his current address, and the most valuable thing you can confirm is that the hearing date is on a calendar someone actually checks.
What You Can and Cannot Do as the Employer
You cannot become his lawyer, and you should not become his investigator. His case file is his; the details of why he fears his home country are his. Do not condition employment on seeing court papers, and do not treat the pending case as a performance issue. Your compliance position is the I-9 file and an unexpired work permit — that is the whole of it. Our immigration guide for employers covers the broader landscape of hiring and compliance.
You can do what this dealership did. You can tell the worker, through whatever language bridge you have, that his job is safe and that hearings go better with lawyers. You can point him to counsel, help him gather what he has filed, and — if you choose — pay for the review or the representation; the lawyer still represents the worker, not the business, but nothing prevents an employer from funding it. You can build hearing dates into your scheduling the way you would any employee’s court obligation. And you can make the business judgment this owner made: a trained mechanic he trusts is worth more than the cost of getting the case looked at properly.
The Calendar Is the Asset
The counterintuitive gift in all of this is time. The same backlog that makes headlines is what gives a worker with a defective filing the year or two it takes to fix it — to rebuild the application, redo the witness statements, and answer the hard legal questions before the government asks them. The employers who lose these workers are, in our experience, rarely the ones whose workers lose at trial years from now. They are the ones whose workers miss a mailed notice, or walk into a merits hearing with a notario’s file and no lawyer. Both failures are preventable, and the prevention starts with exactly the step the dealership in this story took: someone looked.
If you are a Montana, Wyoming, or North Dakota employer with a worker in this situation, we offer this review as a defined, flat-scope engagement: we read the complete file, verify the court posture, and report — to the worker, and with his consent to you — what is good, what is broken, and what it will take to fix. Contact us to set it up.
