A federal judge struck down the Trump administration's $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas on Monday, ruling that the charge was an illegal tax the president had no power to impose without Congress.

U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin, who sits in Boston and was appointed by Barack Obama, sided with a coalition of 20 Democratic state attorneys general that had sued over the fee. In a 42-page decision, he ordered the payment vacated in full.

"The substance and application of the $100,000 payment reveal that it is a tax, regardless of what the payment is called," Sorokin wrote, adding that no statute gave the administration the authority to levy it.

Tax or penalty

The case turned on what the fee actually was. The administration called it a penalty, something it argued the president could impose under immigration law that lets him bar foreign nationals whose entry he deems "detrimental to the interests of the United States." Sorokin disagreed. A penalty it was not, he found; it was a tax, and the Constitution hands the power to tax to Congress alone.

To get there, the judge leaned on recent precedent. He pointed to the Supreme Court's February decision striking down Trump's sweeping tariffs, where the justices held that the president could not assess what amounted to taxes without clear authorization from Congress. The same logic, Sorokin reasoned, sank the visa fee.

He also faulted the process behind it. The fee, he wrote, was pushed through without the public comment period that federal law requires, and the agencies involved never offered a reasonable explanation for a charge of that size. That made it a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act on top of the constitutional problem.

A fee that reshaped a program overnight

Trump created the charge by proclamation last September, framing it as a fix for a program he said had been "deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor." He cast the change as a matter of economic and national security.

The H-1B program dates to 1990 and lets U.S. employers hire foreign workers in specialty fields for up to six years. Congress capped it at 65,000 visas a year, with another 20,000 for applicants holding advanced degrees, though colleges and nonprofit research institutions are exempt from the limit. Before the proclamation, application fees generally ran from about $2,000 to $5,000.

The jump to $100,000 landed hard, and quickly. Citizenship and Immigration Services applied it to new petitions filed on or after September 21, just two days after the announcement, limiting it to new applicants abroad rather than renewals or those already in the country on student visas. The effect was a sharp drop in filings. By mid-February, the agency had collected just 85 of the six-figure payments, down from the hundreds of petitions it typically processes, and some employers, including Walmart, paused their participation outright.

Tech companies are the program's heaviest users, and the bulk of approvals go to workers from India. The states that sued argued the fee would also choke off hiring well beyond Silicon Valley, in public schools, universities, and hospitals that rely on the visas to fill jobs they struggle to staff. California's attorney general, Rob Bonta, who led the coalition, called the charge an unlawful tax that undercut the country's ability to attract skilled workers.

The administration digs in

The White House signaled it would not let the ruling stand. Spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said Trump had clear authority to restrict the entry of any group of foreigners he judged not in the nation's interest, and that the administration was confident the decision would be reversed on appeal.

The Department of Homeland Security was blunter, calling the ruling "blatant judicial activism" and defending the fee as a way to protect American workers and tighten the program's integrity. The department said its immigration changes were meant to push employers to hire Americans first.

Competing rulings set up a fight

Monday's decision does not settle the question, and it runs directly against an earlier one. Late last year, a federal judge in Washington sided with the administration in a separate suit brought by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, finding that Trump did have the authority to set the fee. That ruling came before the Supreme Court's tariff decision that Sorokin relied on, and the Chamber's case is now on appeal.

A third challenge, filed in San Francisco by religious and labor groups, is also pending. With three suits moving through three different appellate circuits, the contradictory outcomes raise the prospect of a split that could eventually push the issue back to the Supreme Court.

For now, the fee is off the books under Sorokin's order, which vacated it nationwide. The charge had been set to expire on its own in September 2026 regardless, but the legal questions it raised, about how far a president can go in attaching a price to immigration, will outlast it. The administration's appeal will test whether the reasoning that toppled the tariffs also holds when the same theory is applied to the visa system.