The Trump administration’s crackdown on legal immigration is making it tougher for foreign professionals – doctors, engineers, professors, artists – to get permission to work and live in the United States.
Federal authorities are denying more of certain work visas and green cards, vetting professionals’ social media platforms and applying enhanced scrutiny to foreign employees’ credentials and work plans in the United States, according to interviews with 15 immigration attorneys, a federal official and three policy analysts. Visa holders also have been subject to more searches, interrogations and denials of entry at airports and border crossings, as well as deportation proceedings and visits to their employers by federal agents, the attorneys and experts said.
The administration this year rolled out a travel ban on 19 countries, a new $100,000 fee on H-1B visas and mandatory in-person interviews for most business and temporary work visa applicants at U.S. consulates in their home countries – a policy change that lawyers say could lead to longer wait times.
Officials also announced a “continuous vetting” policy aimed at all 55 million U.S. visa holders.
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For foreign professionals, the crackdown has meant new levels of anguish and fear – indefinite separation from partners and children living in the United States, termination of employment offers, lost income and dashed opportunities.
“My patients are also suffering, and I’m suffering,” Mustafa Alawad, a 27-year-old Sudanese doctor in Cairo, who was denied a visa after receiving a job offer from an internal medicine residency program at a community hospital in Huntsville, Alabama. The Trump administration denied him a visa because of a ban on visitors from Sudan. So Alawad has been unable to join his fiancée, a dentist, who is already in the United States.
Apple, Accenture, Lyft, Snapchat, Advanced Micro Devices, Pinterest, Silicon Laboratories, Rambus and Datadog have all warned for the first time in recent weeks that the new immigration and visa policies imperil their corporate performance, a review of earnings calls and quarterly reports by The Washington Post found. None of the companies responded to requests for comment.
“Laws and regulations, including immigration,” could “materially adversely affect the Company’s ability to recruit and retain a highly skilled, global workforce,” Apple told investors on Oct. 31. Hospitality and biotechnology firms issued similar alerts.
The State Department has not released data on visa issuances since May, and the latest data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which tracks visa applications and denials, is from June. The available data does not show any notable shift in the number of work visa applications and denials compared with last year, but attorneys say some of the crackdown began more recently.
Major groups representing U.S. employers, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Society for Human Resource Management, declined to comment or did not respond to questions. But the chamber sued the Trump administration last month over its $100,000 H-1B visa fee, in its first lawsuit against this administration.
“This stringent enforcement and stringent examination of what has always been perfectly legal visa categories is new,” said Jeff Joseph, president of American Immigration Lawyers Association. “But companies are too afraid to go out there and say, ‘Look what’s happening.’ … Companies are relying on litigation from the chamber and trade orgs to avoid retaliation.”
Kimberley Best Robidoux, a lawyer at WR Immigration in San Diego, said that after President Donald Trump took office this year, there was an uptick in deportation proceedings against foreign professionals on work visas during what had typically been a 60-day grace period for those switching employers or changing their immigration status.
“We have definitely seen the administration turn the benefits-based visa programs into enforcement tools,” Robidoux said. “This administration is using all the tools in their toolbox in a way where previously the prior administrations may have been using more discretion.”
The administration says these changes are intentional.
“Since day one, President Trump has been clear that he will put Americans first by tightening our immigration laws to ensure that our workers are not displaced, companies are not offshoring labor, and our national security is not compromised,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement to The Post. “The heightened scrutiny in the visa approval process is an administration-wide effort to implement President Trump’s America First agenda, a mandate from nearly 80 million Americans who were tired of being sidelined by the Democrats.”
The State Department is applying more scrutiny across the board rather than cracking down on specific work visa types and regions, a senior department official told The Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity to brief the media. The official said the administration is taking security and public safety seriously, including looking at things like drunken driving and assault charges. Authorities are using social media vetting and other tools in new ways to catch these issues, the official said.
“We don’t see scrutiny as a bad word. … Compared to previous administrations, we do have more scrutiny. National security is more of a priority than ever,” the official said.
The State Department is also scouring for visa fraud because some companies or individuals have applied for business visas, known as B-1s, instead of H-1Bs, even when that was not appropriate. Business visas are unlimited, while H-1Bs are capped.
Despite the new scrutiny, the official told The Post, interview wait times were down in many nations and 80 percent of countries had wait times of 60 days or less for a visa appointment.
Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement to The Post that the agency conducts deportation proceedings and unannounced worksite visits “to restore integrity and ensure the security of our nation’s immigration system.” It added: “The agency is committed to using its [Notices to Appear] authorities against removable aliens and denying or revoking H-1B petitions of those who refuse to comply with site visits.”
Immigration lawyers said professional visa categories appear to be receiving more scrutiny and denials than others, including temporary nonimmigrant visas for high-skilled professionals, such as H-1Bs, J-1s, L-1s and O-1s. The latter is nicknamed the “genius visa” and is designated for individuals of “extraordinary ability” in the sciences, arts, athletics, business and other areas.
The crackdown – heightened denials and enhanced vetting and questioning – has also hit employment-based green cards, including EB-1s, a category for foreigners with extraordinary abilities, three lawyers told The Post, affecting top scientists and engineers working in artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure, payment systems, defense and cybersecurity.
“We’re seeing cases denied for people who build the systems our economy runs on,” said Sameer Khedekar, an immigration lawyer in Silicon Valley. “These are the people who are building the products that hundreds of millions of users use.”
Immigration officials denied one top software engineer at Capital One an EB-1 visa in August, according to a copy of his lawsuit against the government, which was reviewed by The Post. The engineer, an Indian national, had lived in the United States for years, performing “a critical role” in “the development and implementation of cutting-edge AI-driven financial technologies,” the suit said. He had also written articles for scientific journals, peer-reviewed research and judged prestigious contests in his field. Capital One declined to comment.
Applicants from countries identified by the State Department as national security threats, including China, Iran and Venezuela, also are seeing heightened vetting, lawyers said.
For companies, the scrutiny has resulted in delays in project development and hiring, and increased costs associated with managing visa uncertainties, said Alexander Jovy, a lawyer at Global Immigration Partners, who specializes in business visas. Some firms have shifted their hiring plans as a result. Meanwhile, foreign professionals working here have expressed reluctance to travel internationally because of fears about being barred from reentry into the United States.
“The United States is the market where people want to start businesses and want to be innovative and be pushing the envelope,” said Cecilia Esterline, immigration analyst at the Niskanen Center, a moderate think tank in Washington. “And if we lose the people who are able to do that, I think we risk our stature internationally, our competitiveness.”
Jeremy Beck, co-president of NumbersUSA, a group that lobbies for restricting immigration, supports the Trump administration’s narrowing of legal immigration programs, especially amid a souring economy and mounting layoffs.
“The case for large-scale guest worker programs, temporary work visas and permanent work visas is as weak now as it’s been since at least the Great Recession,” Beck said. “They are restoring credibility to the system, increasing the public’s trust that the system is working as it should. Those are good things. But it’s not clear that it’s going to radically change the numbers.”
Still, the administration has sent mixed messages. Last week Trump partially defended the H-1B program in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, saying, “You also do have to bring in talent.”
“You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory, we’re going to make missiles,’” Trump said. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Sharadha Kodem, an immigration lawyer in Irving, Texas, who files work visa petitions mostly for Indian and Southeast Asian nationals, said three of her clients on valid H-1B visas were denied entry by U.S. customs agents after they had been temporarily working remotely in their home country to deal with a family or medical emergency. They have been unable to return to the United States, where they have spouses and children and own homes.
“This didn’t happen under Biden,” Kodem said. “We came out of the first term of the Trump administration going through hell and beyond for our clients. Then it was much more relaxed during the Biden administration, and now the crackdown has started again.”