The Trump administration suspended Microsoft, Adobe and six other firms from the permanent labor certification program, alleging H-1B visa fraud, and opened a probe into university J-1 visas.

The Trump administration on Thursday suspended Microsoft, Adobe and six other companies from the permanent labor certification process, the pathway that allows employers to sponsor foreign workers on H-1B visas for green cards, alleging widespread abuse of the system.

Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the department would not accept new applications or process pending permanent labor certification applications involving the named companies. The companies affected are Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Capgemini.

What the administration alleges

Vice President JD Vance, who leads the administration's fraud task force, said at a press conference that companies had deliberately under-advertised jobs domestically in order to hire foreign workers instead of Americans.

“They will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” Vance said, according to the Associated Press. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has used this system more than Microsoft.”

Vance pointed to certifications companies must make to obtain the visas, including that the worker being hired has a specialized, hyper-capable skill set. “The fraud is that they're making representations when applying for this program that are fundamentally illegitimate and therefore ultimately illegal,” he said.

The administration has clashed with the technology industry over immigration policy since President Donald Trump returned to office, and it has recently moved to impose a fee of more than $100,000 for a single H-1B visa, a measure that drew a legal challenge from business groups.

Microsoft pushes back

Microsoft disputed the characterization in a statement, saying the vast majority of its US employees are American. The company said that of roughly 6,000 H-1B applications it filed in the last fiscal year, 80 percent were to extend or change the status of existing employees rather than to hire new people. New hires, it said, were individuals already legally in the United States and equaled about 1 percent of its US workforce.

“Microsoft only files H-1B petitions for those who meet the rigorous standards of this visa category,” the company said.

According to US Citizenship and Immigration Services data cited by Reuters, Amazon is the top employer of H-1B visa recipients, followed by Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Apple and Microsoft. Representatives for Adobe, Cognizant and Infosys did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Universities also under scrutiny

Alongside the visa suspension, the administration announced subpoenas in a new investigation into multiple universities over their use of J-1 exchange visitor visas. Officials named the University of Pittsburgh, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Brown, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State and MIT as targets.

“We will investigate whether foreign influence, improper financial relationships, or visa abuse are compromising federally funded research,” said Labor Department inspector general Anthony D'Esposito, a former Republican congressman.

Context

Foreign workers made up almost a quarter of the US STEM workforce in 2023, according to the American Immigration Council. Employers argue that visas are needed to fill shortages partly rooted in lagging domestic workforce development.

The move echoes earlier enforcement actions over hiring discrimination. In August, the Department of Justice secured a $3.2 million settlement from OpenAI on claims it under-advertised jobs domestically; similar cases were settled with Meta in 2021 and Apple in 2023.

Whether the suspension survives legal challenge remains uncertain. The companies named have not indicated whether they will contest the decision, and the Labor Department has not published a timeline for when the freeze might be lifted or how investigations will proceed.