When $100,000 Becomes a Constitutional Problem
U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin struck down the Trump administration's $100,000 H-1B visa fee on Monday, and the reasoning matters more than the headline. This wasn't a court rejecting immigration policy on ideological grounds — it was a straightforward separation-of-powers call. The executive branch tried to levy a tax without congressional authorization, and Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution says that's not how this works.
The fee, introduced via executive order in September 2025, replaced the previous $2,000-$5,000 petition cost with a flat $100,000 charge per new H-1B application. The stated goal was workforce protectionism — make foreign hiring expensive enough that companies hire American. Judge Sorokin's opinion didn't touch that policy question. He ruled that the fee structure violated the Administrative Procedure Act because the president has no constitutional authority to impose a tax without statutory delegation from Congress. The Justice Department called it a "regulatory payment." The court called that distinction nonsense.
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