Washington freezes PERM filings by Microsoft, Adobe and six IT firms

The Labor Department on Thursday froze permanent labor certification filings by Microsoft, Adobe and six large IT firms, the step US employers use to sponsor skilled foreign workers for a green card. Labor secretary Keith Sonderling said the department will not accept any new application, or process any pending one, involving Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Capgemini. Vice president JD Vance said no company had abused the system more than Microsoft, and told the firm it had to hire American workers.

The freeze sits on top of a $100,000 fee already placed on fresh H-1B petitions by White House proclamation. Project Firewall, the department's enforcement drive, has opened about 200 cases and levied millions of dollars in penalties, Reuters reported. The Thursday action is narrower than a visa ban. It stops the PERM queue for eight named employers. H-1B status already held by their workers is a separate file.

The numbers Vance's office put against Microsoft

Vance's account, as carried by Reuters, said Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers last year while drawing on 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards. The department called Microsoft the largest filer of PERM applications. A separate set of figures in the same reporting said the named companies had, since 2009, sought almost three million foreign workers, received more than 230,000 H-1B approvals and more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications. USCIS data for fiscal 2026 listed Amazon as the largest employer of approved H-1B beneficiaries, followed by TCS, Infosys, Apple and Microsoft.

About 80 percent of the H-1B applications Microsoft filed in the last fiscal year were extensions or changes of status for people already employed, not petitions for new hires, Reuters reported. Microsoft has also cut about 4,800 jobs, around 2.1 percent of its global workforce, in a later round. Satya Nadella, in the same news cycle, thanked Trump for a medal and said he would keep advancing technology and American prosperity. He did not, in that post, answer the PERM freeze.

The campus inquiry beside the company list

Vance said nine universities would be investigated for what the administration called misuse of exchange-visitor visas to undercut American wages. The names reported include Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, MIT and Columbia. Sarah Spreitzer, a vice president at the American Council on Education, said the wider crackdown could have an enormous economic impact. International students have historically spent about $40 billion a year while in the United States, the same report noted. That figure is a sector total, not a sum tied to the nine campuses.

Indian IT firms on the list, Infosys, TCS, Wipro and HCL, plus Cognizant, have long been among the largest H-1B users. A freeze on their PERM pipeline stops the conversion of an existing visa worker into a permanent resident through those employers. It does not, on Sonderling's words, revoke a visa already issued. The open question for a worker with a pending PERM at one of the eight is whether the file is paused or dead. Sonderling said pending applications will not be processed. He did not say they will be denied. That distinction is the one the affected employers will have to test.