A U.S. federal judge on Monday struck down President Donald Trump’s controversial $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers, ruling it an unlawful tax that the US Congress never authorised.
20 Democratic state attorneys general had challeneged the decision by Trump in September 2025. On Monday, US District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston sided with them in his verdict.
The Trump policy, criticised as arbitary and whimsical by many, had dramatically raised costs for employers seeking to hire high-skill talent from abroad, far above the standard fees of under $8,000. The judge found that by making the policy, Trump’s office exceeded its authority under the Administrative Procedure Act and immigration law.
The H1B ruling provides major relief to U.S. tech, healthcare, and other sectors that rely on high-skill talent from abroad to come to work in the US for them. The H1B program has an annual cap of 85,000 visas. Companies like those in Silicon Valley had warned of staffing shortages and increased offshoring if the fee remained in place. The White House may appeal against the verdict but it is not confirmed yet.
Indians stand to benefit significantly, as they constitute about 60-70%% of H-1B visa holders. The fee had threatened to disrupt career pipelines for thousands of Indian engineers, especially IT professionals. It raised concerns about reduced opportunities, family separations, and pressure on the margins of Indian IT firms.
Indian firms like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and HCL Technologies, which sponsor a significant portion of these visas, were to face billions in added costs, potentially jeopardising thousands of offshore jobs. Similarly, US tech giants like Google, Amazon, Meta, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc were also set to hit hard, as they have relied on the visa program to hire skilled employees from India and other countries.
Trump’s office had claimed that the H1B visa program was being abused. “Information technology (IT) firms in particular have prominently manipulated the H-1B system, significantly harming American workers in computer-related fields”, Trump had stated while imposing the $100,000 fee.
