A judge has struck down Trump's $100,000 H-1B visa fee

The ruling by Judge Leo Sorokin threw out the fee on grounds that it ran afoul of both the Constitution and the federal Administrative Procedure Act, according to Reuters. Judge Sorokin, who sits in Boston, sided with California and 19 other Democratic states that sued to block the charge. "Here, the substance and application of the $100,000 payment reveal that it is a tax, regardless of what the payment is called," he wrote in the ruling.

Trump announced the fee in a September presidential proclamation, arguing the H-1B program had been misused to displace American workers. Before the change, employers typically paid between $2,000 and $5,000 in fees per application. Federal immigration law gave Trump the power to impose such a charge as a penalty on certain foreign nationals, the administration contended — a position Sorokin flatly rejected. The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment from multiple outlets.

The fee had an immediate chilling effect on the program. Court filings from March revealed that only 85 payments of the $100,000 charge had been processed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services through February 15. The government is expected to appeal the decision, according to Bloomberg.

Beyond Monday's ruling, at least two other lawsuits remain active against the fee. A nurse recruiting firm and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have each brought independent challenges to the policy. The Chamber suffered a setback last December when a judge declined to halt the fee at the preliminary stage; that ruling has since been appealed to a federal circuit court in Washington.

Established in 1990, the H-1B program draws high-skilled workers from abroad and today covers an estimated 700,000 people inside the U.S. Each year the program makes available 65,000 standard visas alongside a separate allotment of 20,000 reserved for holders of advanced degrees, with approvals running three to six years. Government data show that H-1B sponsorship is heavily concentrated among a handful of major employers, with Amazon $AMZN, Microsoft $MSFT, Meta $META, Apple $AAPL, and Alphabet $GOOGL ranking among the top users of the program. When Trump announced the fee last September, immigration lawyers worked through the night rerouting clients abroad, and major tech companies moved quickly to return foreign employees to the U.S. before the new rules took effect.

Immigration advocates had warned the fee would reshape the program in ways that harm U.S. competitiveness. Jorge Loweree, managing director at the American Immigration Council, said at the time that a charge of that size would reduce petitions — particularly from smaller businesses — and shift the program further toward large corporations able to absorb the cost.