Second Judge Blocks Trump's $100,000 H-1B Fee — Agencies 'Failed to Follow Necessary Rule-Making Processes'
On Sept. 30, 2026, U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam (N.D. Cal., Obama appointee) blocked the unprecedented $100,000 fee President Trump imposed on new H-1B visas, ruling that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the State Department "failed to follow necessary rule-making processes12" before implementing it. Gilliam granted a preliminary block requested by a coalition of unions, employers and nonprofits that sued in October 2025, barring the agencies from implementing the fee pending the outcome of the case.
It is the second district-court block: the fee was first halted in June 2026 by a judge in Boston in a suit brought by 20 states, and the First Circuit declined to pause that decision in July. Trump — who had extended the fee (originally set to expire Sept. 21) for another year on Sept. 18 — imposed it by invoking the president's power to restrict the entry of foreign nationals "detrimental to U.S. interests," replacing a typical $2,000–$5,000 fee structure. DHS in August moved to adopt a permanent fee of about $103,000 through rulemaking, which will present different legal issues when challenged. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which lost its own challenge below, has a third suit on appeal.
"Today's decision ... protects a system that was thrown into chaos overnight." — Steve Bressler, Democracy Forward
What it means
Courts keep rejecting the claim that the president can unilaterally levy a six-figure fee on a statutorily capped visa program through the entry-suspension power — the same procedural (rulemaking) logic that has sunk other unilateral executive actions. The fee's survival now runs through the slower administrative channel (the ~$103K permanent rule), with litigation to follow. A small but clean example of the week's pattern: executive action by fiat, checked on process grounds.
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An instance of Executive action by fiat keeps losing on process, not policy. — The second H-1B fee block turns on skipped rulemaking, leaving the six-figure fee's survival to the slower administrative channel. ↩︎
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An instance of Unilateral executive overreach over the administrative state triggers a procedural backlash from federal courts. — A six-figure visa fee imposed by entry-suspension fiat is preliminarily blocked on rulemaking grounds — executive action checked on process, not policy. ↩︎