President Trump’s effort to protect American workers from a broken H-1B system just suffered a significant legal setback. A federal judge in Boston struck down the $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas this week, undercutting one of the only real tools designed to make companies think twice before importing foreign labor instead of hiring American workers.
U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin ruled that the fee violated the Administrative Procedure Act, finding the President lacked authority to impose what he called a “tax” on visa petitions. The suit was brought by 20 Democrat attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta and Massachusetts’s Andrea Campbell, a partnership that has repeatedly challenged the administration’s immigration agenda.
The ruling contradicts an earlier decision in a separate case brought by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which remains on appeal in Washington and could be decided any time. The administration has already appealed Sorokin’s ruling and asked the court to stay it. A third suit in San Francisco, filed by religious and labor groups, all but guarantees a circuit split and a trip to the Supreme Court.
Before the increase, most H-1B applications cost only a few thousand dollars, which is pocket change for the tech giants that dominate the program. Nearly three-quarters of H-1B approvals go to workers from India, a number that undercuts the industry claim that H-1Bs fill rare, specialized skill gaps. Rather, the reality is that they are a parallel labor pipeline that keeps wages down and opportunities scarce for American graduates.
The Department of Homeland Security criticized the ruling as “blatant judicial activism,” arguing the administration’s reforms exist to serve American citizens and workers, not a system that keeps importing foreign labor at their expense. The White House said it expects the ruling to be reversed on appeal.
Naturally, AG Bonta celebrated, calling the fee “unlawful” and casting it as an attack on the country’s ability to attract talent. Campbell and the American Medical Association made similar arguments about staffing shortages in education and healthcare arguments that skip past the harder, more obvious fix: training and recruiting American workers instead of leaning indefinitely on a “temporary” visa pipeline that suits Big Tech’s bottom line more than American families.