President Donald Trump's $100,000 fee for H-1B visas is not legal, a federal judge said on June 8.
Although the president is able to restrict noncitizen entry into the United States, Congress has the power to tax, and federal law does not delegate it, the judge said.
He also ruled that the fee violated a law called the Administrative Procedure Act because it was issued without allowing the public to comment before it took effect, and ordered officials to vacate the policy in its entirety.
Some 65,000 regular H-1B visas are offered each year, as well as 20,000 additional visas for workers with advanced degrees.
“President Trump has clear legal authority to restrict entry of any class of aliens he determines is not in America’s best interests, and that is exactly what he did," Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, told The Epoch Times in an email.
"The H-1B program has been abused for decades, and President Trump finally took action to fix it. A federal judge in Washington already upheld a nearly identical order, and the Administration is confident this order will be reversed on appeal.”
The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts and 19 other states. They challenged the fee, which Trump announced last September as a way to reduce taxes and bring more qualified people into the country.
“The H-1B visa program helps bring talented people with critical skillsets to Washington, keeping our state on the cutting edge in highly specialized areas of education and research,” Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown said at the time.
“The federal government can’t arbitrarily turn these visas into an extortion racket to punish employers and institutions the President does not like.”
A different judge in late 2025 had upheld the fee, finding that Trump had the authority to increase the fee from between $2,000 to $5,000 to the $100,000 level. An appeal is pending in that case.