U.S. Department of Labor Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito posted on X on October 5, 2026 that there is a “big week ahead on the foreign labour visa front,” without naming a specific new rule or announcement. The post capped two and a half weeks in which the Trump administration escalated enforcement against the H-1B skilled-worker visa program on several fronts at once: a presidential directive ordering agencies to screen for sponsor-linked layoffs, an expanding criminal fraud investigation that has already reached named companies, and a second federal court ruling blocking the administration’s $100,000 H-1B petition fee.
On September 18, 2026, President Trump signed Executive Order 14431, “Enhancing Program Integrity and Interagency Coordination in the Administration of the H-1B Nonimmigrant Visa Program” (published in the Federal Register on September 23), directing the Departments of State, Labor and Homeland Security to assess whether companies petitioning for H-1B workers have recently laid off, or plan to lay off, American employees in comparable roles. The order also instructed the Department of Labor to begin reviewing previously submitted Labor Condition Application (LCA) data within 30 days to identify possible violations. The same week, D’Esposito’s office disclosed that investigators had already issued dozens of federal subpoenas and executed search warrants in multiple states as part of a fraud, worker-exploitation and potential human-trafficking probe into the program; visa processing for IT services firms Cognizant and Cloudera has been suspended pending the criminal investigation, and field audits at Dallas-area sites turned up locked doors and empty offices despite hundreds of approved H-1B petitions tied to those addresses. D’Esposito told reporters on September 27 that broader scrutiny also extends to major outsourcing firms including Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and to third-party staffing agencies that place H-1B workers across multiple client sites, and said: “I think that the foreign labor visa program is going to look very different 365 days from now than it does today.”
Separately, the administration’s $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions — first imposed by proclamation in September 2025 and extended by President Trump in September 2026 to run through September 21, 2027 — was blocked for a second time on September 30, when US District Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. of the Northern District of California issued a preliminary injunction in Global Nurse Force v. Trump. The court found the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in showing that the Department of Homeland Security’s guidance implementing the fee was arbitrary and capricious and skipped the notice-and-comment rulemaking the Administrative Procedure Act requires; a first injunction against the fee, issued in June 2026, was upheld on appeal in July. The fee is not currently being collected by US Citizenship and Immigration Services, though the administration may appeal. Vice President JD Vance addressed the program on October 2 in a video posted to X, calling the H-1B program “completely broken” and saying he would support eliminating it outright, while defending the $100,000 fee as a deterrent against what he described as abuse of the program: “If you’re going to bring in an accountant making $45,000 a year to replace an accountant who is an American making $60,000 a year, that’s not you using the program to bring in a genius. That’s you destroying American jobs and defrauding the American people.”
These actions layer on top of a selection-process change already in force: a Department of Homeland Security final rule replacing the H-1B cap’s traditional random lottery with a wage-weighted selection process took effect February 27, 2026, giving registrants in higher Department of Labor prevailing-wage tiers proportionally better odds of selection; it applied to the FY2027 cap registration period that ran from March 4 to March 19, 2026.
Taken together, the people most directly affected are H-1B visa holders and prospective registrants — a population drawn heavily from India and, in smaller numbers, China — along with the employers who sponsor them, particularly the large IT-outsourcing and staffing firms now under direct federal scrutiny, and any employer that has recently reduced its US workforce while also seeking to sponsor H-1B workers in similar roles. As of this writing, neither D’Esposito’s office nor the White House has specified what the “big week” actually contains; officials have so far described it only in the terms quoted above.
References
Federal Register – Enhancing Program Integrity and Interagency Coordination in the Administration of the H-1B Nonimmigrant Visa Program (Executive Order 14431) / ANI News – “Big Week Ahead”: Trump Administration Signals Major Action on Foreign Labour Visa Front / Business Today – ‘Going to Look Very Different in 365 Days’: US Labor Dept Watchdog Warns Amid H-1B Crackdown / JURIST – Second Federal Judge Blocks President Trump’s $100K H-1B Visa Fee and Orders DHS to Complete Proper Rulemaking / The Tribune – US VP JD Vance Says H-1B Visa Programme “Completely Broken”, Should Be Scrapped / Ogletree – DHS Announces Final Rule Establishing Weighted Selection Process for Cap-Subject H-1B Petitions
