A federal judge on Monday vacated President Donald Trump’s $100,000 fee for employers’ H-1B visa applications for highly-skilled foreign workers.
The policy implementing the high fee on the visas for workers in a specialty occupation violated the federal Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution, Judge Leo Sorokin declared in the ruling in U.S. District Court in Boston.
The Trump administration plans to appeal the decision.
“Every day, thousands of people with H-1B visas serve New Yorkers as doctors, teachers, and other skilled workers,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose state is one of 20 states that sued to block the fee.
“Today a court put an end to this administration’s illegal attempt to destroy this critical program and the many jobs it makes possible,” James said.
Sorokin agreed with the states in finding “the substance and application of the $100,000 payment reveal that it is a tax,” and that Congress had not delegated that power to the executive branch.
The judge cited the Supreme Court’s opinion in February striking down Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs on imports from most of the world’s countries because he lacked the legal authority to unilaterally impose them.
In that case, the high court ruled that tariffs assessed by the Department of Homeland Security “amount to taxes for the purposes of the Constitution’s Taxing Clause,” Sorokin noted. The Homeland Security Department is a defendant in the H-1B case.
Trump blasted Sorokin’s decision when he was later asked by a reporter in New York if he would try to have Congress approve the fee.
“These federal judges are really giving us a hard time,” said Trump, who in recent weeks has seen federal judges order the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., block a Department of Justice “Anti-Weaponization” fund set up to settle a lawsuit he filed against the IRS, and deliver other setbacks to his administration.
“It’s really crazy what’s going on with the court system,” he said. “They’re hurting our country very badly.”
The H-1B policy was created in 1990 and is heavily used by U.S. tech giants to bring in highly skilled workers from overseas.
The program allows U.S. employers to seek government permission to hire nonimmigrant workers in specialty occupations for up to six years.
Trump implemented the $100,000 fee in a presidential proclamation last September. He argued that the H-1B visa program was being misused and undermining U.S. economic and national security through the “large-scale replacement of American workers.”
Before his proclamation, H-1B visa fees had ranged from $2,000 to $5,000 per application.
Several companies, including Walmart, said that they would pause their participation in the H-1B program as a result of Trump’s proclamation.
The program is capped at 65,000 visas annually, plus an additional 20,000 for those with a master’s degree or doctorate from a U.S. institution.
But just 85 payments of the $100,000 fee had been made as of February 15, the Trump administration said in a March filing, Reuters reported.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told CNBC in a statement after Monday’s ruling, “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.”
“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,” Rogers said.
The lawsuit was filed in December against the Trump administration and a number of top officials. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce in October filed its own lawsuit challenging the $100,000 H-1B visa policy.
— CNBC’s Dan Mangan contributed to this article.
