Democratic attorneys general in 19 states, led by California and Massachusetts, are suing the Trump administration over its $100,000 fee for H-1B visas.
The lawsuit announced on Friday argues that the fee imposed by the administration goes far beyond the actual cost for an H-1B application, and goes against the Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act.
“As the world’s fourth largest economy, California knows that when skilled talent from around the world joins our workforce, it drives our state forward. President Trump’s illegal $100,000 H-1B visa fee creates unnecessary — and illegal — financial burdens on California public employers and other providers of vital services, exacerbating labor shortages in key sectors,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement Friday.
“The Trump Administration thinks it can raise costs on a whim, but the law says otherwise,” Bonta continued.
The visa is meant for a limited number of jobs, and there are only 65,000 new ones doled out annually. However, 20,000 more H-1B visas are issued for those who have a “master’s degree or higher” from a college within the United States.
According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website, there have been “enough petitions” sent to the federal government for both caps for fiscal year 2026.
“President Trump promised to put American workers first, and his commonsense action on H-1B visas does just that by discouraging companies from spamming the system and driving down American wages, while providing certainty to employers who need to bring the best talent from overseas,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told The Daily Wire in a statement.
“The Administration’s actions are lawful and are a necessary, initial, incremental step towards necessary reforms to the H-1B program,” she continued.
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A September presidential proclamation stated that the program “has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor” and it has veered off from its original intention.
The proclamation added that companies “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.”
The lawsuit comes at a major tipping point for immigration nationwide, as the Trump administration recently stopped immigration processes for people from 19 “high-risk” countries following the shooting of two National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., by an Afghan national who entered as part of a refugee program following the botched 2021 troop withdrawal from the Middle Eastern nation. In addition, deportation efforts are still underway as the Supreme Court will soon be tackling whether or not birthright citizenship is constitutional.
