Thousands of H-1B visa holders rushed back to the United States this weekend amid confusion over President Donald Trump's executive order imposing a $100,000 fee on new visa petitions. By Saturday evening, a White House official clarified that the rule would apply only to new applicants and not to existing visa holders or renewals - an announcement that calmed a wave of corporate travel advisories and canceled flights.
The order, signed Friday, initially sparked fears that even valid visa holders outside the U.S. could be barred from reentry unless their employers paid the fee. Immigration attorney Douglas Russo warned on LinkedIn, "If you are an H-1B worker outside the U.S. who already has an H-1B visa, the safest approach is re-entering before Sunday."
That message spread quickly through the tech sector, prompting Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Goldman Sachs to issue urgent memos directing employees to stay in the country or fly back before the 12:01 a.m. Eastern Time deadline Sunday. Social media filled with accounts of disrupted plans, including passengers deplaning at San Francisco International Airport and a United Airlines flight from New York to Paris returning to the gate to let a passenger off after she received legal guidance to stay in the U.S.
"It is a situation where we had to choose between family and staying here," said an engineer whose wife remained on a flight to Dubai to care for her sick mother. Another Nvidia engineer told Reuters, "It feels surreal. Everything is changing in an instant."
By Saturday afternoon, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow issued a memo confirming that "the proclamation does not apply to aliens who... are the beneficiaries of currently approved petitions, or are in possession of validly issued H-1B non-immigrant visas." The White House later emphasized the $100,000 fee would take effect in the next lottery cycle and apply only to petitions not yet filed.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said companies would have to pay the new fee "for each petition," while White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt clarified that it is a one-time fee, not an annual charge. For major employers like Amazon and Microsoft, the cost could exceed $1 billion if applied to all new hires.
IBM Vice Chairman Gary Cohn said on CBS' Face the Nation that the clarification had restored order. "I think it caused a panic over the weekend because people weren't sure what was going on with the existing H-1B visas," he said. "It's been cleaned up over the weekend, so at this point, there's not a panic in the system."
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said the move fulfills Trump's campaign pledge to protect American workers. "President Trump promised to put American workers first, and this commonsense action does just that by discouraging companies from spamming the system and driving down wages," Rogers said.
