A federal judge in Massachusetts has vacated President Trump's policy requiring employers to pay $100,000 for each new H-1B visa petition, ruling that the administration imposed what amounts to an unauthorized tax that only Congress can levy. The decision, issued Monday by U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin, hands a win to a coalition of 20 states that challenged the measure, and sets up yet another clash between the judiciary and the White House over the limits of executive power on immigration.
The White House wasted no time signaling it will fight. Spokesperson Taylor Rogers told Fox News Digital that the administration is "confident this order will be reversed on appeal," noting that a federal judge in Washington had already upheld a nearly identical order in a separate case.
But for now, the policy is gone, vacated in its entirety. And the ruling exposes a recurring pattern: Obama-era judicial appointees wielding procedural arguments to block executive action on immigration, while the structural problems the policy was designed to address go unresolved.
Sorokin's 42-page decision rests on two pillars. First, he found that the $100,000 payment functioned as a tax rather than a permissible immigration restriction. The Immigration and Nationality Act gives presidents broad authority over the entry of noncitizens, the judge acknowledged, but imposing taxes is a congressional prerogative.
As the Washington Examiner reported, Sorokin wrote in the decision: "Here, the substance and application of the $100,000 payment reveal that it is a tax, regardless of what the payment is called."
Second, Sorokin ruled that federal agencies violated the Administrative Procedure Act by implementing the policy without notice-and-comment rulemaking, the standard process that gives affected parties a chance to weigh in before a regulation takes effect. The judge concluded that the agencies exceeded their statutory authority on both counts, and he declared the policy unlawful.
"While the Executive has broad discretion over the admission and exclusion of aliens,... that discretion is not boundless."
That line, from the decision itself, captures the judge's framing. But the White House sees it differently, and has reason to believe the appellate courts may, too.
The ruling directly conflicts with a December 2025 decision by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in Washington, who declined to block the same policy after dismissing claims brought by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. That split between two federal courts on the same executive action all but guarantees the issue will move up the appellate ladder.
Rogers, the White House spokesperson, framed the conflict plainly:
"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."
The Department of Homeland Security went further. As AP News reported, DHS called the ruling "blatant judicial activism dismantling President Trump's historic efforts for immigration reform."
This is not the first time Sorokin has blocked a Trump administration immigration initiative. Last year, he became the fourth judge to issue a nationwide injunction against Trump's executive order seeking to limit birthright citizenship, a dispute that has since reached the Supreme Court, with a ruling expected in the coming weeks. That pattern of Obama-appointed judges intervening against Trump-era policies has become a defining feature of the administration's legal landscape.
Before Trump's proclamation, employers typically paid between $2,000 and $5,000 in filing fees to sponsor an H-1B worker. The $100,000 requirement represented, as Sen. Lisa Murkowski put it on X, "a 5,000% increase in some cases." Approximately 65,000 foreign workers receive H-1B visas each year.
The administration's stated rationale was straightforward: the visa program has been exploited by employers who use foreign labor to undercut American wages. The September proclamation that created the fee stated that visa holders "undercut working Americans by artificially suppressing wages and making it difficult to attract and retain highly skilled temporary workers."
That argument resonates with millions of American workers who have watched entire industries, particularly in technology, build hiring pipelines around cheaper foreign labor while qualified domestic applicants are passed over. The H-1B program was designed to fill genuine gaps in the American workforce, not to serve as a discount labor marketplace for corporations looking to pad their margins.
But the legal question is narrower than the policy debate. Even if the fee was good policy, Sorokin's ruling says the president cannot impose it unilaterally. That distinction matters, and it points to a failure that extends well beyond the courtroom.
If only Congress can impose a fee of this kind, then Congress bears responsibility for the decades of inaction that left the H-1B program ripe for abuse in the first place. The administration tried to use executive authority to fix a problem that lawmakers have refused to touch. The judge said no. But the underlying dysfunction, a visa system that critics across the political spectrum acknowledge is broken, remains exactly where it was.
The lawsuit was brought by 20 state attorneys general. Newsmax reported that all 20 were Democrats, and their framing of the case leaned heavily on the impact to businesses, universities, and healthcare providers. New York Attorney General Letitia James wrote on X that "We won our case against the Trump administration for trying to destroy the H-1B visa program," adding that "thousands with these visas serve New Yorkers as doctors, teachers, and other skilled workers."
Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown struck a similar note, saying in a press release that "Maryland's schools, hospitals, and universities depend on highly skilled professionals from around the world to keep their doors open and their communities served."
The framing is telling. These officials cast the ruling as a victory for immigrant communities and the institutions that employ them. What they do not address is the program's well-documented history of wage suppression and employer manipulation, the very problems the $100,000 fee was designed to discourage.
Not all opposition came from the left. Murkowski, identified in the Fox News report as a Republican senator, praised the ruling's timing for Alaska's schools, which she said are "in the midst of hiring before next fall." She noted that many rural and remote school districts in Alaska rely on H-1B visas to recruit teachers. The courts have increasingly become the arena where immigration policy clashes play out, with the White House and state officials trading legal volleys over executive authority.
"In Alaska, this isn't a partisan issue: the state legislature unanimously passed a resolution last month urging the federal government to waive the fee for educators."
Murkowski's point about rural schools is fair. But a blanket judicial vacatur of the entire policy, rather than a targeted carve-out for specific sectors, does nothing to distinguish between a rural school district trying to hire a math teacher and a Fortune 500 tech company importing cheaper engineers.
Sorokin, a Yale and Columbia Law School graduate, was nominated to the federal bench by President Barack Obama in 2013 and confirmed by the Senate in 2014. His record on Trump-era immigration policy is consistent: block first, let the appeals courts sort it out later. The D.C. Circuit has already weighed in on similar disputes over presidential immigration authority, and the legal terrain remains unsettled.
President Trump, asked about the ruling Monday evening, did not hold back.
"These federal judges are really giving us a hard time. It's really crazy what's going on with the court system. They are giving us a very, very hard time, and they shouldn't be doing it. They're hurting our country very badly."
The frustration is understandable. The administration identified a real problem, proposed a concrete fix, and watched a single district judge erase it. Meanwhile, the competing Howell ruling in Washington stands, creating a legal contradiction that only a higher court can resolve.
Breitbart noted DHS's sharp criticism of the decision, with the department framing the fee as part of the president's broader immigration reform agenda. The split between the two district courts virtually guarantees appellate review, and possibly Supreme Court attention down the road.
The birthright citizenship case already on the Supreme Court's docket shows how quickly these judicial disputes can escalate. And the broader trend of federal courts issuing conflicting rulings on immigration enforcement only deepens the uncertainty for employers, workers, and agencies trying to operate within the law.
The administration has signaled clearly that it will appeal. The conflicting district court rulings create exactly the kind of circuit split that higher courts exist to resolve. Whether the First Circuit sides with Sorokin or with the administration's reading of executive authority will shape not just H-1B policy but the broader question of how far a president can go to reform immigration without waiting for a Congress that has shown no appetite for the job.
For now, the $100,000 fee is dead. Employers can resume filing H-1B petitions at the old rates. And the program's underlying problems, the wage suppression, the employer gaming, the displacement of qualified American workers, remain exactly as they were before the president tried to do something about them.
One judge in Massachusetts decided the fix was illegal. Fine. But someone still has to fix the problem, and the 535 members of Congress who actually hold the taxing power have shown no sign they intend to try.