On September 19, 2025, President Trump issued a Proclamation titled “Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers, to address systemic abuse of H-1B nonimmigrant visas.” With the justification of countering, what the Trump Administration considers abuses of the H-1B visa program that disadvantage U.S. workers in specialty occupations, in which foreign workers are employed under the H-1B visa, the Trump Administration has imposed a fee of $100,000 for every petition for an H-1B visa or status filed on or after September 21, 2025.

For all intents and purposes, this is a move by the Trump Administration to shut down the H-1B visa program by means of a poison pill. President Trump and his inner circle have never hidden their hostility to the U.S. immigration system enabling foreign workers to come to the U.S. to perform jobs that they believe could and should be filled by U.S. workers. When you go beyond the nativist and anti-immigrant sentiments that are also mixed into President Trump’s and his supporters’ policy choices, there are also some valid points about how tech worker placement agencies have gamed the H-1B visa system to bring Indian tech workers more or less as indentured servants, undercutting the wage and working conditions that U.S. employers would have to pay U.S. workers. These tech worker staffing firms usually bring the tech workers from India and hold over the workers’ heads a large bill with inflated expenses for the visa application process, travel, lodging, among other things, and if they do not agree to work overtime without overtime pay and submit to sweat-shop-like working conditions, the tech staffing firm threatens to send the worker back to India, where the company will sue the workers and force them to pay off the grossly inflated bill. However, instead of going through the more detailed and laborious process of figuring out how to fix the current H-1B visa laws and regulations to stop these abuses of the system, the Trump Administration has just made the H-1B visa program unworkable for all U.S. employers including those who are not part of the problem.

The Trump Administration imposed this $100,000 application fee pursuant to sections 212(f) and 215(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which are provisions that were created by Congress to enable the President to block foreign persons from entering the U.S., who constitute a security threat to the country. I anticipate that employers will sue the Trump Administration to overturn this policy. There are multiple legal bases for overturning this policy:

1.This policy is clearly a misuse of the authority granted by Congress, since the H-1B visa applicants are not security threats to the U.S., as envisaged by this authority;

2.The Trump Administration has exceeded its authority by imposing a fee that Congress never approved or established by law and the fee is not being charged in order to defray the administrative costs of the application process;

3.The policy is overbroad in its application, since it is imposed on all employers and their prospective employees, which means that it will have the effect of harming U.S. businesses that need H-1B workers, but are not engaging in the harmful conduct that this policy seeks to end*;

4.The Trump Administration does not explain how extracting a fee of $100,000 for each H-1B petition will actually solve the problem, since there is no indication that the fees will be earmarked, for example, to fund a program such as for training U.S. tech workers; and

5.The Trump Administration implemented this policy without going through the rulemaking process that is required whenever the executive branch and its administrative agencies enact a new rules and regulations.

*While the Department of Homeland Security can grant exceptions, where it determines that it is in the national interest of the U.S. to do so, there will still be U.S. companies harmed by this policy, which are not engaging in the abuses that the Trump Administration purports to want to combat with this policy.

I anticipate that companies harmed by this policy will file lawsuits in the federal courts and will succeed in enjoining the implementation of the policy for the reasons listed above and others, in addition. This is an oft-repeated scenario, whereby the Trump Administration tries to solve a complex legal problem without investing the hard work and thought that is necessary to stop clever cheaters from gaming the system and without implementing the legal solution through the drawn-out rulemaking process that can take a couple of years to complete, but is necessary in order for new regulations to be adopted in a way that will withstand legal challenges in the federal courts. I anticipate that this policy will be stopped by federal court injunctions within weeks and will be blocked altogether before the next H-1B lottery in March 2026 and the H-1B petition period that follows from April 1, 2026.

An article in the Wall Street Journal revealed just how chaotic and slapdash the formulation of policy for legal immigration has been in the Trump Administration. Please click here to view the article.

To view the proclamation on the White House’s website, please click here.

To view USCIS’s clarification of the legal impact of the proclamation, particularly as it applies to pending and approved H-1B petitions, please click here.