For about four days in June, the most expensive document in American immigration law was dead. On June 8, 2026, a federal judge in Boston struck down the Trump administration’s $100,000 fee on every new H-1B visa petition, the one the White House announced in September that turned a several-thousand-dollar paperwork cost into a six-figure toll. New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led the lawsuit, called it a win. Then, on June 12, the exact same judge hit pause on his own ruling, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services went right back to collecting the $100,000. If you are an employer in Brooklyn trying to keep a nurse, a researcher, or a software engineer, you are paying it again right now.
The H-1B program lets employers petition for workers in specialized fields, medicine, education, technology, the arts, for up to six years. On September 19, 2025, President Trump signed a proclamation tacking a $100,000 payment onto every new H-1B petition filed on or after 12:01 a.m. Eastern on September 21, a one-time charge that does not touch current visa holders or people extending their status, according to guidance compiled by the University of Colorado Boulder’s international scholar office. James and a coalition of 18 other state attorneys general filed suit in December 2025 to block it; by the time the case was decided, the coalition had grown to 19 other states.
They won on the merits. U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin, an Obama appointee on the District of Massachusetts, granted the states summary judgment and vacated the fee, ruling in California et al. v. Markwayne Mullin that the $100,000 charge is not a regulatory fee at all but a tax, and that the Constitution gives the power to levy taxes to Congress, not the president. The court also found the administration skipped the notice-and-comment rulemaking the Administrative Procedure Act requires and acted arbitrarily, per a National Law Review analysis of the decision and a breakdown from immigration firm Adams and Reese. For roughly four days, USCIS was not supposed to require the fee on any pending petition.
“Every day, thousands of people with H-1B visas serve New Yorkers as doctors, teachers, and other skilled workers,” James said in her June 8 statement. “Today a court put an end to this administration’s illegal attempt to destroy this critical program and the many jobs it makes possible. Workers with these visas contribute immensely to our state, and I will keep fighting to stop this administration’s unjust and unlawful attacks on our immigrant communities.”
Then came June 12. The administration appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and Judge Sorokin temporarily stayed his own order while that appeal plays out, according to law firm Fragomen, which tracks the docket. In practice, USCIS is again permitted to require the $100,000 fee for approval of qualifying H-1B petitions, as immigration attorneys summarized after the stay. The government has until June 18 to formally ask the First Circuit to keep the fee alive through the appeal; if it misses that deadline, the lower court’s order knocking the fee out snaps back into effect. The win is real. For now it is on hold.
This is not abstract for New York. James’s office says more than 13,000 people on H-1B visas work across the state’s technology, finance, and arts sectors, and that the State University of New York alone employs 693 of them, many serving students in rural and suburban districts. More than a third of all healthcare workers in New York are immigrants, and the coalition argued in the lawsuit that pricing H-1B hires out of reach would deepen an already acute nursing shortage. A $100,000 charge does not make a hospital in a short-staffed county hire an American nurse who isn’t there to hire. It makes the foreign nurse unaffordable and the shift goes unfilled. The court found that argument persuasive enough to vacate the rule. The stay freezes it again.
The ruling fits a pattern of the administration’s immigration moves losing in New York courtrooms and in the data. Bushwick Daily reported earlier this month that 76 percent of people swept in the administration’s New York City immigration enforcement operations had no criminal record, according to the city’s own court data, despite the “worst of the worst” framing. The H-1B fight is the white-collar version: a policy sold as protecting American workers that, on the record in front of Judge Sorokin, mostly reads as an unauthorized tax with a $100,000 price tag.
James was joined in the suit by the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin. The next move belongs to the First Circuit, and the calendar is short. If you work at a New York employer that sponsors H-1B talent, or you are on one of those visas, the question now is whether the stay holds past June 18 and how the appeals court rules after that. You can read the court’s full decision and order on the New York Attorney General’s site at the California et al. v. Markwayne Mullin decision page, and track the office’s filings through the attorney general’s press releases, which is where any update on the appeal will land first.
Featured image: Joecento / CC0 1.0 via Wikimedia Commons
