H-1B Visa Fee Blocked by Second Federal Judge

A second federal judge just struck down the H-1B visa fee. The six-figure charge on new visas for highly skilled foreign workers has been bouncing between courts for a year, but U.S. District Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr., sitting in Oakland, California, handed down a 35-page order on September 30, 2026, wiping out the federal policies behind the September 2025 proclamation that created the fee and its September 2026 extension.

The order tells U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the State Department, and other agencies to stop enforcing or implementing anything tied to the proclamation until they do the step the government skipped the first time: a formal public rulemaking process, with advance notice, a chance for the public to comment, and an analysis of how the charge would land on small businesses, as the legal publication Law Commentary reported.

The court sided with the challengers on two big claims. First, the agencies never seriously considered any alternative to the six-figure number before imposing it, which the judge called arbitrary and capricious. Second, the fee policies were effectively new regulations, and new regulations require the public to get a say first.

In a pointed aside, the judge noted the government had never raised H-1B fees without advance notice before, "and had never increased them by anywhere close to this magnitude," according to US Immigration Today's account of the 35-page order. Steve Bressler, a lawyer with Democracy Forward, which represents the plaintiffs, told reporters the decision "protects a system that was thrown into chaos overnight." The court also waived the plaintiffs' bond and refused the government's request to freeze the ruling during an appeal.

Why the H-1B visa fee ruling matters to Gen Z

Here is the part that hits closest to home for anyone on a student visa or fresh out of college: the fee is paid by employers, not the workers themselves. So a charge this steep quietly reshapes the job market for international students and recent graduates hoping to work in the United States after graduation. And the employers fighting it are not just Silicon Valley giants. The coalition behind this lawsuit includes a California nurse-staffing agency, a Detroit auto-parts manufacturer, a rural North Carolina kidney-care practice, a K-12 school on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota, and public language-immersion charter schools, alongside unions and nonprofits.

A quick refresher on the program itself: H-1B visas let U.S. employers hire foreign workers with specialized skills and at least a bachelor's degree, good for three years with a possible extension. New visas are capped at 85,000 a year and handed out by lottery, and the large majority go to computer-related jobs. People born in India accounted for 71 percent of approved petitions in fiscal 2024, and most new H-1B hires who were already in the United States had arrived on student visas — the campus-to-work pipeline is the main route into American jobs for many international students. More coverage of the political fight lives on the politics topic page.

Timeline: how the H-1B visa fee keeps losing in court

• September 2025 — Trump imposes the fee on many new H-1B petitions for workers hired from abroad.
• October 2025 — A coalition of unions, employers, and nonprofits, led by Global Nurse Force, files suit in California.
• June 8, 2026 — A Massachusetts judge strikes the fee down in a separate lawsuit brought by twenty states, ruling it works as a tax that Congress never authorized.
• July 24, 2026 — A Boston-based appeals court refuses to pause that ruling while the government appeals it.
• August 2026 — Homeland Security starts moving toward a permanent fee of roughly a hundred and three thousand dollars through formal rulemaking, a separate track with different legal issues.
• September 2026 — Trump extends the fee for another year instead of letting it lapse on September 21, 2026, a move covered in the earlier story on the extension.
• September 30, 2026 — Judge Gilliam vacates the agency policies, handing the fee its second judicial defeat on different legal grounds.

The comparison is what makes the ruling sting. The last two H-1B fee increases before all this were roughly eleven hundred dollars in 2024 and a ten-dollar bump in 2019. Before the proclamation, total filing costs for employers generally ran from under a thousand dollars to around seven and a half thousand dollars depending on the petition. The new charge was in a different universe from anything the program had ever seen.

The administration, for its part, has framed the fee as a way to curb abuse of the H-1B program and protect American workers, particularly in science and technology jobs. Supporters of the charge argue that some employers use the program to hire lower-paid foreign workers instead of recruiting domestically, pointing to cases where American tech workers said they were asked to train their own replacements. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, as Reuters reported.

The fight is unlikely to end here. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has filed a third lawsuit challenging the charge and is appealing a judge's rejection of its claims, the government's appeal of the June Massachusetts ruling is still pending, and the August rulemaking could eventually produce a sturdier version of the fee through the front door. For now, though, the H-1B visa fee has lost in court twice. US Immigration Today notes this latest ruling also covers the September 2026 renewal, closing the loophole the extension tried to open.