U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin ruled that the $100,000 fee for H-1B visas is unlawful. According to the ruling, the fee for foreign workers “imposes a tax on H-1B petitions without the requisite delegation by Congress.”
The initial lawsuit, filed in December, argued that the policy “exceeds the fee-setting authority conferred by Congress and tramples on the intricate structure created by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and subsequent legislation” and is “arbitrary and capricious in multiple senses.”
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told CNBC in a statement following the ruling, “President Trump has clear legal authority to restrict entry of any class of aliens he determines is not in America’s best interests, and that is exactly what he did.”
“The H-1B program has been abused for decades, and President Trump finally took action to fix it. A federal judge in Washington already upheld a nearly identical order, and the Administration is confident this order will be reversed on appeal,” Rogers said.
In 2025, President Trump issued a proclamation addressing H-1B visas. It declared that some employers, “using practices now widely adopted by entire sectors, have abused the H-1B statute and its regulations to artificially suppress wages, resulting in a disadvantageous labor market for American citizens, while at the same time making it more difficult to attract and retain the highest skilled subset of temporary workers, with the largest impact seen in critical science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.”
To mitigate this issue, the proclamation said that entry into the United States for those wishing to perform specialty occupation services “is restricted, except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000.”
