Court rules Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee for foreign workers unlawful

A US federal judge on Monday struck down a $100,000 fee US President Donald Trump imposed on new H-1B visas for highly skilled ‌foreign workers, concluding that it constituted an unlawful tax Congress never authorized, Reuters writes.

US District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston issued the ruling, in a lawsuit filed by 20 Democratic state attorneys general challenging a fee Trump announced in September that dramatically raised the cost of obtaining H-1B visas, which tech companies in particular rely heavily on to bring on foreign workers.

The ​administration argued the fee constituted a lawful monetary penalty that the president was authorized to impose under federal immigration law, which gives ​him the power to restrict the entry of certain foreign nationals when he deems it “detrimental to the interests of the ⁠United States.”

But Sorokin concluded that the fee was not a penalty but a tax that the Republican president lacked any authorization from Congress to ​issue and that the US State Department and US Citizenship and Immigration Services could not implement.