A federal judge in Massachusetts has vacated President Donald Trump’s $100,000 payment requirement for employers seeking new H-1B visas, ruling that the executive branch imposed what amounts to a tax without congressional authority. U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin, an Obama appointee who previously blocked Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, sided with a coalition of 20 states in a 42-page decision issued Monday, Fox News Digital reported.
The ruling strips away a centerpiece of the administration’s effort to overhaul a visa program that Trump’s September 2025 proclamation described as having been “exploited” to replace American workers with lower-paid foreign labor. The White House says it expects to win on appeal, pointing to a separate federal court decision that reached the opposite conclusion.
But for now, the $100,000 requirement is gone, and the pattern of Obama- and Biden-era judges dismantling Trump’s executive actions continues to grow.
Sorokin’s core finding is blunt: the $100,000 payment functions as a tax, and only Congress can impose taxes. The Immigration and Nationality Act gives presidents broad authority over the entry of noncitizens, the judge acknowledged, but that power has limits.
“While the Executive has broad discretion over the admission and exclusion of aliens,… that discretion is not boundless.”
The judge drew a sharp line between restricting immigration and taxing it. In three words that capture his reasoning, Sorokin wrote: “Taxes are not ‘restrictions.'”
Before Trump’s proclamation, employers typically paid between $2,000 and $5,000 in filing fees to sponsor an H-1B worker, depending on application type and company size. The new $100,000 requirement represented a twenty-fold increase at minimum, imposed without notice-and-comment rulemaking, which Sorokin found violated the Administrative Procedure Act. He also concluded that the federal agencies implementing the policy exceeded their statutory authority.
The result: Sorokin declared the policy unlawful and vacated it in its entirety. Approximately 65,000 foreign workers receive H-1B visas each year, and the ruling removes the fee for all of them.
Sorokin is no stranger to high-profile clashes with the Trump administration. Last year, he became the fourth judge to issue a nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s executive order seeking to limit birthright citizenship, ruling that the policy is likely unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. That dispute has since reached the Supreme Court, with a ruling expected in the coming weeks.
Sorokin graduated from Yale and Columbia Law School. President Barack Obama nominated him to the federal bench in 2013, and the Senate confirmed him in 2014. His track record of blocking Trump administration priorities fits a broader pattern that conservative legal observers have watched with mounting frustration, as seen in a recent ruling striking down the administration’s immigration halt on high-risk countries.
The question is not whether any single judge gets a case wrong. The question is whether the system that routes major policy disputes to sympathetic courts, where Obama- and Biden-appointed judges issue sweeping nationwide orders, serves the constitutional design or subverts it.
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told Fox News Digital the administration stands by its authority and its policy. Rogers framed the ruling as an outlier that will not survive appellate review.
“President Trump has clear legal authority to restrict entry of any class of aliens he determines is not in America’s best interests, and that is exactly what he did.”
Rogers added a pointed reminder that not every federal court has agreed with Sorokin’s reasoning.
“The H-1B program has been abused for decades, and President Trump finally took action to fix it. A federal judge in Washington already upheld a nearly identical order, and the Administration is confident this order will be reversed on appeal.”
That Washington case involved U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who in December 2025 declined to block the policy after dismissing claims from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that the additional H-1B charge violated federal immigration law. The split between Sorokin and Howell sets the stage for a potential appellate conflict, and possibly another trip to the Supreme Court.
The Associated Press reported that the Department of Homeland Security denounced Sorokin’s decision as “judicial activism,” while noting the conflicting rulings raise the possibility of divided appellate outcomes.
The coalition that brought the lawsuit consisted of 20 states. The Washington Examiner reported that the suit was filed by 20 Democratic state attorneys general after Trump announced the fee. Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell celebrated the ruling.
“Today’s victory protects the integrity of the H-1B visa program as a tool to address severe labor shortages in vital industries like education, healthcare, and medical research.”
That framing tells you everything about the incentive structure. The attorneys general who sued did not argue that American workers deserve higher wages or better protections from displacement. They argued that employers deserve cheaper access to foreign labor. The corporate interests aligned on the same side, Breitbart noted that business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had challenged the policy in separate litigation.
When Democratic attorneys general and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce want the same outcome, ordinary workers should pay close attention to who is being served, and who is being replaced.
Sorokin’s ruling is the latest in a string of federal court decisions blocking Trump administration initiatives. The pattern extends well beyond immigration. A federal judge recently blocked the USDA from enforcing SNAP conditions even as a fraud probe revealed billions in waste. In another case, a Biden-appointed judge halted the administration’s move to end temporary protected status for Ethiopia.
Each case has its own legal particulars. But the cumulative effect is unmistakable: a single district judge can freeze a nationwide policy, and the forum-shopping incentives ensure that plaintiffs find the friendliest bench available. The administration wins in one courtroom, loses in another, and the policy remains in limbo while appeals grind forward.
On H-1B visas specifically, the legal landscape is now fractured. Howell upheld the fee in Washington. Sorokin struck it down in Massachusetts. The administration says it will appeal. The Supreme Court may eventually have to settle the matter, just as it is preparing to rule on the birthright citizenship dispute that Sorokin also blocked.
Meanwhile, the D.C. Circuit recently blocked another Trump policy in a split ruling, with the administration vowing to take that fight to the Supreme Court as well. The judiciary’s appetite for nationwide injunctions shows no signs of slowing.
Strip away the legal technicalities and the fight is straightforward. The Trump administration tried to make it significantly more expensive for employers to bring in foreign workers on H-1B visas, a program that issues roughly 65,000 visas per year. The stated goal was to discourage abuse and protect American workers from being undercut by cheaper imported labor.
The opposition came from corporations that benefit from the current system, Democratic officials who frame cheap foreign labor as addressing “shortages,” and a federal judge who concluded the president overstepped his authority by imposing a fee that looks more like a tax.
Sorokin may be right on the narrow legal question. If the $100,000 payment truly functions as a tax, then Congress, not the president, holds the constitutional power to impose it. That is a serious argument rooted in the separation of powers, and it deserves honest engagement rather than dismissal.
But the broader picture matters too. Congress has failed for decades to reform an immigration system that nearly everyone acknowledges is broken. When the executive branch acts to fill that vacuum, the judiciary steps in to block it. When the judiciary blocks it, Congress shrugs and moves on. The cycle repeats, and the status quo, which benefits employers at the expense of American workers, remains untouched.
The administration’s appeal will test whether higher courts agree that a president’s broad authority over immigration stops at the threshold of a fee that functions like a tax. The answer matters. But the deeper failure belongs to a Congress that refuses to do its job, leaving the courts and the executive branch to fight over the scraps of authority that remain.
American workers did not create this mess. They just keep paying for it.
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