Healthcare providers, religious groups, and university professors mounted a collective challenge
The new US$100,000 fee US President Donald Trump laid on H-1B visa applications has encountered what may be its first significant legal challenge, reported the Associated Press.
A federal suit to halt the fee’s implementation was filed in San Francisco district court last Friday October 3 by a group that includes healthcare providers, religious groups, and university professors. The suit indicated that the H-1B visa program is key to the recruitment of healthcare workers and educators.
Trump’s order has “thrown employers, workers and federal agencies into chaos,” the group said in a snippet of the suit published by AP News. The president had signed the proclamation on September 19, with the order set to take effect 36 hours later.
In response, employers told workers who were out of the country to return to the US immediately.
“Without relief, hospitals will lose medical staff, churches will lose pastors, classrooms will lose teachers, and industries across the country risk losing key innovators. The suit asks the court to immediately block the order and restore predictability for employers and workers,” the Democracy Forward Foundation and Justice Action Center said in a statement published by AP News.
The center described the fee as “Trump’s latest anti-immigration power grab.” Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman claimed that Trump’s fee could drive corruption and was unlawful.
The president had claimed that the H-1B program was “deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor,” per a statement published by AP News. The visa program had originally been developed by the US Congress to bring in a highly skilled workforce for specialized fields like technology, which has struggled to fill roles.
The suit said that approximately one-third of workers holding this visa are nurses, teachers, physicians, scholars, priests, and pastors. H-1B visas are generally granted by lottery, with Amazon in Seattle getting over 10,000 visas approved this year. The majority of H-1B visa holders are California residents.
The suit argued that since Congress developed the H-1B visa program, Trump could not use executive orders to quickly rewrite it or levy new taxes.
The defendants named in the suit are Trump, the State Department, the US Department of Homeland Security and US Customs and Border Protection. The latter two bodies did not immediately respond to requests for comment, AP News said.
