The Donald Trump administration is launching a second attempt to set an extremely high fee for H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign professionals. It plans to publish a proposal in the Federal Register on Tuesday to impose a $103,265 charge when applying for the visa, despite a court rejecting a similar plan in June.
If approved, the new fee would apply to H-1B visa petitions subject to an annual cap. That program, created by Congress, currently grants up to 65,000 visas of this type to foreign professionals and 20,000 to workers who hold a U.S. master’s degree, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in the proposal. The payment would be in addition to existing fees, it added.
H-1B visas have been a target of the president since he returned to the White House in January 2025, because the program, he claims, has been “deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement” the country’s skilled workforce. That rationale underpinned the measure he enacted in September of last year that imposed a $100,000 charge when applying for the visa. About 20 states sued the government to try to block it from taking effect, and in June federal judge Leo Sorokin of Massachusetts sided with them, finding it to be a disguised tax. At the time, total fees to apply for an H-1B visa ranged from nearly $1,000 to about $7,600.
“The defendants [the federal government] argue that the required $100,000 payment is a ‘regulatory payment’ that does not amount to a tax. This is mere ipse dixit. Defendants offer no definition for what constitutes ‘a regulatory payment,’ cite no cases or statutes employing the term, and advance no reasoned argument explaining how this term encompasses something different than a tax or a penalty,” Sorokin wrote in his June decision. “In any event, the manner in which a particular payment is labeled does not determine whether the payment can be viewed as an exercise of Congress’s taxing power, because what matters is the substance and application of the payment, not its designation,” he added.
The government appealed and asked to stay Sorokin’s ruling while the case was further reviewed. But an appellate court declined to do so.
Potential impact of restricting H-1B visas
In this new attempt, the administration argues that charging just over $100,000 per visa application would help “recoup” part of the cost of administering the legal immigration system. That, it says, would help avoid a possible judicial block like the one that halted the prior plan.
“This fee would serve as a dedicated revenue mechanism to help recover a portion of the federal government’s costs of administering the lawful immigration system, including activities carried out by DHS, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the U.S. Department of State (DOS), and the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL),” the official document states.
When challenging the previous fee in court, the states suing said a charge of that magnitude would complicate hiring teachers for elementary schools, high schools, and colleges, which would “exacerbate existing teacher shortages.” They added that the impact could also be felt in the health sector, affecting the ability to provide adequate services and raising costs for state health insurance programs.
Under the new proposal, the fee would not apply to H-1B petitions from employers who are currently exempt from the annual cap, such as nonprofit research organizations.
The plan is part of a much broader effort in which the U.S. government has removed immigration benefits that protected thousands of migrants from deportation and has stepped up an offensive to expel undocumented people on a large scale, including those with no serious criminal records.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition
