An Obama-appointed federal judge has delivered the Trump administration another setback in the fight over its $100,000 fee on certain new H-1B visa petitions.
But the headlines do not tell the whole story.
Federal Judge Haywood Gilliam blocked federal agencies from enforcing the policies they used to carry out President Trump’s fee, including under the administration’s September extension. His ruling hits the current implementation machinery.
It does not erase the President’s underlying immigration authority, and it does not settle every claim in the case.
A federal judge in California blocked federal agencies’ implementation of a $100,000 Trump administration charge for businesses to hire workers on H-1B visas. https://t.co/En4YSTS0cH
— Bloomberg Law (@BLaw) September 30, 2026
The case is Global Nurse Force v. Trump, brought by a coalition that includes employers, unions, schools, healthcare recruiters and religious organizations. They argued that immigration agencies turned Trump’s proclamation into a new payment requirement without going through the notice-and-comment rulemaking demanded by federal administrative law.
Immigration Analytics reports that Gilliam vacated the agency policies implementing the charge and barred enforcement under both the original 2025 proclamation and its 2026 extension. The ruling reaches the guidance and policies used by the Departments of Homeland Security and State to demand the payment from covered employers.
The challengers include healthcare recruiters, unions, schools and religious organizations. They argued that the agencies imposed a sweeping new financial condition without the public notice-and-comment process required by the Administrative Procedure Act.
Gilliam accepted that procedural challenge against the agencies, which is why the existing implementation framework cannot remain in force. Crucially, the court deliberately did not decide the claims aimed directly at President Trump, following the Supreme Court’s approach to injunctions against a sitting president.
That makes this a major procedural defeat, but not the final word on the policy itself.
The judge’s political pedigree is not speculation. The Northern District of California says Gilliam was nominated to the federal bench by President Barack Obama on September 8, 2014, and confirmed by the Senate on December 16 of that year.
His official biography says he earned his undergraduate degree from Yale in 1991 and his law degree from Stanford in 1994. He then clerked for U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson before entering private practice.
Gilliam also served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the same Northern District of California from 1999 to 2006, including two years as chief of its Securities Fraud Section. He returned to private practice before receiving Obama’s nomination, so “Obama-appointed” is a documented description of how he reached the bench, not a guess about his motive in this case.
Second judge blocks Trump's $100,000 fee for new H-1B worker visas https://t.co/7iWVp5JqSc https://t.co/7iWVp5JqSc
— Reuters (@Reuters) October 1, 2026
Trump first imposed the $100,000 payment in September 2025 for certain H-1B workers outside the United States. The policy was designed to make employers think twice before reaching overseas for lower-paid labor while qualified Americans were available.
Last month, President Trump extended the restriction for another year.
The White House proclamation says the largest IT staffing and outsourcing firms reduced their combined H-1B registrations from 24,946 to 2,055 after the fee and a new weighted-selection system took effect. It also says consular-processing requests fell nearly 97 percent between the fiscal 2025 and fiscal 2027 cap seasons.
What are your thoughts?
The administration’s position is straightforward: the H-1B program was created to supplement the American workforce with exceptional skills, not to replace American graduates with a cheaper pipeline. The fee was intended to reserve overseas hiring for workers an employer truly considered indispensable.
The challengers tell a different story. Hospitals, schools and research institutions say a six-figure charge can make it impossible to recruit nurses, teachers and specialists for jobs they struggle to fill domestically.
Those competing arguments have now produced conflicting rulings around the country.
A second federal judge on Wednesday blocked an unprecedented $100,000 fee that US President Donald Trump has imposed on new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers. https://t.co/CKWuWXD1KR
— Reuters Legal (@ReutersLegal) October 1, 2026
A federal judge in Massachusetts struck down the fee in June, concluding that the executive branch imposed what amounted to a tax without congressional authorization. An earlier ruling in Washington, D.C., had upheld the policy.
The split makes appellate review all but inevitable.
Gilliam’s order gives opponents a broad win against the agency memos and guidance now in use. The administration can appeal, ask for a stay or attempt to rebuild the policy through formal rulemaking. What it cannot safely do is pretend that the procedural problem identified by the court does not exist.
That is the part conservatives should take seriously.
If the goal is a durable America First immigration system, the policy has to survive after the press conference and after the first hostile courtroom. Strong objectives need legally resilient execution.
The battle is not over. It has simply moved to the next round, where the administration will have to defend both the President’s authority and the way his agencies carried it out.
