Trump is upping the price of Big Tech’s favorite visa

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In the span of a few hours on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would be implementing a fee of over $103,000 on H-1B visas, and news broke that the State Department plans on revoking the visas of up to 200,000 asylum seekers — which, according to The Associated Press , would be the largest mass visa revocation in US history.

More than a year into President Donald Trump’s second term, it’s become clear that the only way Trump can get the deportation numbers he wants is by stripping legal immigrants of status . Beyond having ICE arrest, detain, and deport immigrants, the administration is pressuring noncitizens to “self-deport,” in some cases imposing civil fines on them and threatening to seize their assets. It’s creating legal hurdles not only for new legal immigrants but for those already in the country, and in the process, likely hurting businesses and social services nationwide.

H-1B visas are often seen as synonymous with Big Tech, in no small part because Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are the three biggest employers of H-1B workers. A federal judge struck down Trump’s previous attempt to raise the cost of these high-skilled employment visas in June, but not until over 70 employers paid the $100,000 fee . Now Trump wants to raise the cost to $103,265. Advocates and business leaders are worried Trump will soon come after the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which DHS hinted may soon carry a $100,000 fee of its own. OPT lets international students work in their field of study for 12 months, with extensions of up to 24 months for some STEM students and additional extensions for holders of certain graduate degrees.

“Every single other pathway is harder, outlawed, eliminated, more bureaucratic, more difficult across the board.”

“This is clearly unlawful,” said Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, an immigration reform organization founded by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives in 2013. “We don’t have to guess what this is for. This is to get rid of the OPT and H-1B program, which will have upstream and downstream devastating consequences: companies will be started elsewhere, people will be hired elsewhere.”