A replacement work card is supposed to be the same card again. One asylum applicant found out it may not be.
On the Hacking Immigration Law live show, a Ugandan asylum seeker said his original EAD ran through 2029, but after he lost it and asked for a replacement, the new card came back expiring in eighteen months. When he asked USCIS to reissue it to the original date using his old card as proof, he said the answer was that it no longer worked that way — that “with a new policy,” any card they now produce “will still expire within 18 months.” That account is the applicant’s own; USCIS has not published a notice describing it. But the practical exposure is real either way.
An EAD’s validity is set by the rules at 8 C.F.R. § 274a.13, tied to the eligibility category and its underlying period of authorized stay. A card issued under one of those rules controls regardless of what an earlier card said, so the safe assumption is that the date printed on the card in hand is the date that matters. The employer’s I-9 reverification runs off that date too — which is why the attorney’s instinct was to put the currently valid card in front of the employer rather than the lost one.
mic What the Attorney Says
“Oh, then that one you should give to them. … And you’re going to have to file for renewal.”
The renewal timing is the part that bites. A shortened card collapses the runway for the next I-765, and renewals are already moving slowly — adjudications have stretched toward the two-year mark, with applicants turning to mandamus to force a decision. Anyone who assumed an old expiration date and planned to coast until then should recheck the card they actually hold and file the renewal the moment the window opens, not when the original date would have come due.