The Trump administration wants to force foreign workers on H-1B and other employment-based visas to leave the country immediately after losing their jobs, eliminating an Obama-era grace period that critics say encouraged visa holders to linger without authorization.
The Department of Homeland Security filed an unpublished proposed rule with the Federal Register this week that would end the discretionary 60-day window currently granted to nonimmigrant visa holders whose sponsoring employment ends. Under existing regulations, workers who are laid off, fired, or quit can remain in the United States for up to two months while they seek a new sponsor or prepare to depart. The new rule would wipe that cushion out entirely, Fox News Digital reported, restoring the pre-2017 expectation that a worker's legal status ends when the job ends.
The rule, filed as Federal Register document 2026-18631, is scheduled for formal publication on Friday, September 11, 2026. After that, a two-month public comment period must run before the proposal can take effect as law.
The scope of the change reaches well beyond Silicon Valley's H-1B workforce. The New York Post reported that the rule would apply to holders of H-1B skilled-worker visas, O-1 extraordinary-ability visas, TN visas for Canadian and Mexican professionals, E-1 and E-2 treaty-trader and treaty-investor visas, E-3 visas for Australian specialty workers, L-1 intracompany-transfer visas, and H-1B1 visas, a joint category covering workers from Chile and Singapore.
Dependents of those visa holders, spouses and children who hold derivative status, would also be affected. The DHS proposal references "the alien and the alien's dependents" in describing the administrative confusion that the current grace period creates, though the rule document does not spell out a separate timeline for dependent departures.
Before 2017, none of these workers had a guaranteed grace period. DHS created the 60-day window through a rulemaking that took effect on January 17, 2017, three days before President Trump first took office. The proposed rule frames the rollback as a return to the longstanding default, not a new restriction.
The proposal's language is blunt about why DHS wants the change. The department argues that tying a worker's legal presence directly to active employment is more consistent with the statutory purpose of nonimmigrant visa categories, and that administering the grace period drains agency resources.
"This proposal restores a direct relationship between an alien's nonimmigrant status and the specific employment or activity that formed the basis of his or her admission or grant of status in the United States and reduces administrative burden."
DHS also contends that the process of deciding when the 60-day window applies, reviewing submitted information, and determining whether to shorten or eliminate the period on a case-by-case basis is "time consuming and complex for the agency and confusing or unpredictable for the petitioner." In other words, the department says the grace period creates paperwork and uncertainty for everyone involved, employers, workers, and federal adjudicators alike.
On the labor-market side, the department made a pointed assumption. It expects that employers who lose a foreign worker will fill the position with an equally qualified American, sponsor a new nonimmigrant worker through the standard I-129 petition process, or reassign the duties to existing staff. The administration's broader "Buy American and Hire American" agenda is the backdrop for that expectation. DHS acknowledged in the filing that "some of these petitioners may incur a temporary loss of productivity due to labor turnover" but treated that cost as acceptable.
The proposal fits a pattern. The Trump administration has moved aggressively on multiple immigration fronts over the past year, including a push to revoke up to 200,000 visas from foreigners who filed asylum claims while holding other legal status.
The timing of the original grace period is worth noting. DHS finalized the 60-day rule in 2016, and it took effect on January 17, 2017, the last business day of the Obama administration. Trump was inaugurated three days later. The regulation was part of a broader package of late-term Obama immigration rules, and its narrow window of adoption has long drawn conservative criticism as a last-minute policy gift to the immigration-advocacy lobby.
For nearly a decade, the grace period gave employment-based visa holders a two-month runway to find a new employer willing to sponsor them, apply for a change of status, or arrange an orderly departure. Supporters of the policy argued it prevented sudden disruptions for skilled workers caught in layoffs, particularly during the tech-industry downsizing cycles of 2023 and 2024. But the Trump DHS now frames that same flexibility as a loophole that weakened the link between a visa and the job that justified it.
The administration has also been willing to let other immigration protections lapse. Earlier this year, Temporary Protected Status for 348,000 Haitians expired after the Senate blocked an extension, a move that drew fierce opposition from the left but aligned with the administration's position that temporary designations should not become permanent residency by default.
The grace-period proposal does not exist in isolation. President Trump signed two executive orders on September 19, 2025, that established the Trump Gold Card, a $1 million investment visa offering foreign nationals permanent residency and a pathway to citizenship, and introduced a $100,000 fee for H-1B visa applications, a dramatic increase from the typical $2,000 to $5,000 cost.
That fee hike has already run into trouble. A federal judge in Boston ruled against the $100,000 H-1B visa fee, calling it an unauthorized tax. The administration is appealing. The Washington Examiner noted that the grace-period rollback is part of the same regulatory push to reshape the legal-immigration system around stricter enforcement and tighter employer obligations.
Courts have been a recurring obstacle for the administration's immigration agenda, but they have also delivered wins. A federal judge recently conceded that the Supreme Court had cleared Trump to end Haiti TPS protections, and the Fifth Circuit ended in-state tuition for illegal immigrants in a ruling that handed the Trump DOJ a significant victory.
Fox News Digital contacted DHS and the White House for further comment on the proposed rule. Neither had responded as of publication. Several important details remain unclear.
The proposal does not specify exactly which statutory authority DHS is invoking beyond a general reference to "statutory purpose." It does not enumerate every affected visa subcategory in plain terms, saying only "certain visas, particularly H-1B visas." And while the filing mentions dependents, it does not explicitly state whether a spouse or child on a derivative visa, an H-4 holder, for example, would face the same immediate-departure requirement or some separate process.
The two-month comment period will give employers, immigration attorneys, and advocacy groups a window to challenge the rule on legal and practical grounds. Whether DHS adjusts the final version in response, or pushes it through largely unchanged, will signal how far the administration is willing to go in dismantling the regulatory architecture that has cushioned legal foreign workers for nearly a decade.
The principle is straightforward: a work visa is for work. When the work ends, the visa should end with it. Whether Washington has the nerve to enforce that simple idea, and whether the courts will let it, is the only question left.