A second federal judge has blocked the federal government from enforcing President Donald Trump’s $100,000 charge on many new H-1B petitions, adding another nationwide barrier to a policy that sharply raised the cost of hiring skilled workers from abroad.
In a 35-page order filed Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam Jr. vacated the policies used by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the State Department to carry out the fee. He found that the agencies likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act by creating binding rules without public notice and comment, and by failing to weigh alternatives and the reliance interests of employers. The agencies are barred from enforcing the policies until they complete formal rulemaking and the small-business analysis required by law.
The ruling does not settle every legal question surrounding the president’s proclamation. Gilliam expressly said the case was not about whether restricting the H-1B program is wise policy. Instead, his order focused on the agencies’ implementation: how the payment would be collected, when it would apply and what employers must show to obtain an exception. Those operational rules, he concluded, created legal duties and therefore could not be issued as informal guidance.
A fee already under pressure
The decision in Global Nurse Force v. Trump is the second federal ruling to disable the fee. A Massachusetts judge previously vacated the same agency policies in a case brought by 20 states, and the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to pause that judgment while the government appeals. A separate Washington court upheld the proclamation in litigation brought by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, producing the kind of judicial split that Gilliam said may ultimately require Supreme Court review. Reuters reported that the White House had not immediately commented on the latest ruling.
Trump first imposed the $100,000 payment in September 2025, invoking presidential authority to restrict the entry of foreign nationals deemed detrimental to U.S. interests. The original White House proclamation directed agencies to deny qualifying petitions that lacked the payment, while allowing national-interest exceptions. A September 2026 extension renewed the policy for another year. The administration says the charge discourages lower-paid outsourcing and protects American workers; its extension cited sharp declines in filings from large staffing firms and consular-processing requests.
H-1B visas let U.S. employers sponsor temporary workers in specialty occupations that generally require highly specialized knowledge and at least a bachelor’s degree or equivalent. Congress caps most new visas at 65,000 a year, plus 20,000 for workers with advanced degrees from U.S. institutions. Some universities and nonprofit organizations are exempt from that cap. The court said ordinary statutory and regulatory charges had totaled no more than $7,595 at the high end before the new payment.
Why the procedural ruling matters
The plaintiffs include a manufacturer, a rural medical practice, a tribal school, charter schools and a nurse-staffing company. Their attorneys argued that the six-figure cost prevented smaller employers from sponsoring engineers, physicians and teachers they said were difficult to recruit domestically. Gilliam found that evidence of disrupted medical services, lost expertise and unfilled teaching jobs supported a likelihood of irreparable harm. The coalition’s case description says it sued because Congress had established the program’s fees and worker protections through statute.
The administration’s immigration strategy is not finished. DHS has separately proposed a $103,265 charge through formal rulemaking for all cap-subject H-1B petitions. The proposal says the money would help finance immigration administration across several agencies and could generate about $8.8 billion a year if 85,000 covered petitions were filed. Its public-comment period closed September 24. Because that proposal followed notice-and-comment procedures and relies on fee-setting authority rather than only the presidential entry proclamation, it presents a different legal dispute and is not directly resolved by Wednesday’s order.
For employers, the immediate effect is clarity on the existing proclamation fee but continued uncertainty about what replaces it. USCIS’s implementation guidance had instructed adjudicators to deny covered petitions without proof of payment or an approved exception. That enforcement pathway is now blocked by two courts, but the government can appeal and continue the separate regulatory process.
Businesses also should not read the order as eliminating the ordinary H-1B framework. Employers still must meet wage, specialty-occupation and petition requirements, and cap-subject cases still face a limited annual allocation. What changed is the supplemental payment attached to the proclamation. The ruling may be especially consequential for smaller organizations that cannot spread a six-figure charge across a large workforce. At the same time, the administration’s own data show that the policy substantially changed filing behavior, so removing it could again increase demand. That tension—between access to specialized labor and protection of U.S. workers—will remain central when DHS evaluates comments on its proposed replacement fee.
The larger issue is the boundary between presidential control over entry and the procedural obligations of agencies that translate a proclamation into day-to-day rules. Gilliam did not invalidate the H-1B program, alter its annual cap or decide that a high fee could never be adopted. He ruled that agencies cannot create the practical machinery of a sweeping payment requirement without using the process Congress required. That distinction leaves the administration with avenues to pursue its policy, but not the shortcut it used.
