Oakland judge blocks Trump's $100,000 H-1B fee pending a rule-making

A federal judge in Oakland has blocked the Trump administration from collecting a $100,000 charge on new H-1B visas, the second district-court order against the fee in four months. US District Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr ruled on 30 September that US Citizenship and Immigration Services and the State Department put the charge into effect without the notice-and-comment steps required under the Administrative Procedure Act.

Gilliam, appointed by President Barack Obama, granted a request from a coalition of unions, employers and nonprofits. His order stops the agencies from enforcing the September proclamation, and a later White House extension of it, until a proper rule-making is finished. The case is Global Nurse Force v. Trump, No. 4:25-cv-08454, in the Northern District of California.

The fee was already under a separate court order. On 8 June, US District Judge Leo T. Sorokin in Boston voided the policy in its entirety in a case brought by 20 states. Sorokin wrote that the charge looked like a tax, and that Congress holds the exclusive power to levy taxes. He rejected the administration's description of the payment as a regulatory fee the executive could set on its own. A Boston-based appeals court declined in July to pause that decision. The fee has therefore been blocked in that litigation for about two months.

What the Oakland order adds

The California case is narrower in its legal theory and wider in its practical reach. Gilliam did not rest the injunction on the tax argument. He focused on process. After President Donald Trump signed the proclamation, Customs and Border Protection and USCIS issued memoranda and frequently asked question pages on who had to pay, how to pay, and how entry and exit would work. Gilliam said those documents, and the extension issued this month, cannot be enforced until the agencies run a notice-and-comment rule-making.

That distinction matters for employers. A firm that lost in one courtroom could still have faced collection under a different theory. Two injunctions, on two grounds, now sit between the proclamation and the border. Democracy Forward, which represents plaintiffs in the Oakland case, said through senior legal adviser Steve Bressler that the order stops the agencies from carrying the fee into effect while the suit continues.

The original proclamation was due to expire on 21 September. Trump extended it for another year, which would have kept the charge in place through September 2027 if the courts had not intervened. The extension is covered by Gilliam's order.

A permanent fee is already in draft

The Department of Homeland Security moved in August to adopt a lasting fee of about $103,000. That proposal, if finalised, will raise different legal questions from the suits over a fee set by presidential proclamation. The current cases ask whether the president can impose the charge alone. A final DHS rule would be judged against the statute that authorises visa fees, the record the department builds, and the comments it receives. Gilliam's order does not decide that future fight.

The H-1B programme is the main route for specialty-occupation workers hired from outside the United States. Petitions have long carried filing charges in the low thousands of dollars, plus fraud-prevention and training fees. A $100,000 payment is a different order of cost. It falls on the employer, not the worker, and it applies to new hires outside the country. Firms that use the visa for nurses, engineers and researchers told both courts that the charge would stop hires they cannot fill locally.

India is the largest source country for H-1B approvals in a normal year. A fee of this size changes the arithmetic for Indian information technology firms that place staff on US client sites, and for US hospitals that recruit nurses through the same category. The Oakland plaintiffs include a nurse-staffing group, which is why the case caption begins with Global Nurse Force. The Boston plaintiffs were states that said the fee would hit public hospitals and universities.

Two theories, one blocked charge

The administration has argued that the charge is a condition of entry, not a tax, and that the president's authority over the admission of aliens covers it. Sorokin rejected that reading in June. Gilliam did not need to reach it. He held that even if the agencies could impose such a fee, they could not do it by memorandum. An earlier judge, Beryl Howell in Washington, had reached the opposite conclusion on the proclamation in a different case and allowed the fee to proceed. That split is part of why the Oakland and Boston orders now do the practical work.

Employers still have to watch the August proposal. If DHS finishes a rule near $103,000, the litigation will move from the proclamation to the regulation. Until then, the charge set by the White House remains blocked in both the state-led case and the coalition case. The next dated event is whatever schedule the Northern District of California sets for a ruling on the merits, and whatever appeal the Justice Department files against Gilliam's injunction.