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.
