A Boston judge struck down the $100,000 H-1B fee. The diaspora's relief comes with an asterisk.
Judge Leo Sorokin ruled the fee an unlawful tax. Indians hold most H-1B visas, so the decision lands hardest here — but the administration is already appealing, and the squeeze on green cards and visa appointments hasn't let up.
A federal judge in Boston has thrown out the $100,000 fee the Trump administration placed on new H-1B visas, calling it what the people who sued said it was all along: a tax the president had no power to levy.
Judge Leo Sorokin of the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts issued the decision on 8 June. "Here, the substance and application of the $100,000 payment reveal that it is a tax, regardless of what the payment is called," he wrote. He leaned on a February Supreme Court ruling that struck down Trump's tariffs on the same reasoning: the president cannot raise money Congress never authorised.
No community has more riding on the outcome than this one. Indians have taken roughly 70 percent of H-1B visas year after year, by USCIS's own count, so a fee aimed at the program is, in practice, a fee aimed at them.
How big the fee was
The charge arrived by presidential proclamation in September 2025. Overnight, the cost of a new H-1B petition jumped from the usual $2,000-to-$5,000 range to $100,000. The number worked less like a fee than a wall. By 15 February, USCIS had received just 85 of the $100,000 payments. Employers stopped filing rather than pay.
Twenty Democratic state attorneys general brought the main case; the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ran a parallel challenge. Sorokin ruled against the fee on every count — constitutional, statutory, administrative — and vacated it.
What the diaspora said
The relief was real, and guarded. "We welcome the Massachusetts federal court's decision striking down the USD 100,000 H-1B visa fee, which restores predictability and fairness to the employment-based immigration system," Khanderao Kand of the Foundation for India and Indian Diaspora Studies told reporters.
Sanjeev Joshipura, who runs the network Indiaspora, named the catch out loud: "All stakeholders connected with H-1B visas will heave a sigh of relief after the court order, but one wonders if this is truly the end of the matter."
The asterisk
He was right to wonder. Three days after the ruling, the administration filed to appeal. White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said the government is "confident Sorokin's order will be reversed." Until the appeal plays out, the fee is gone but not buried.
It was never the only pressure, either. The June visa bulletin pushed the employment-based green-card queue further out of reach for Indians: the EB-2 category slipped about ten and a half months, back to a cutoff of September 2013. An Indian engineer who files today can wait decades for permanent residency. The bulletin lengthened the line.
At the consulates the story rhymes. After a December order expanding social-media vetting of H-1B and H-4 applicants, interview slots in India have been pushed deep into the year. The visa you can finally afford is still one you have to wait to stamp.
So the $100,000 fee is dead, for now, and that counts — it was the bluntest of the recent measures and the one people felt first. But for the Indian professional asking whether the United States is still worth the trouble, one struck-down fee set against a lengthening green-card line and a consular backlog is not a win. It is a reprieve.
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