First posted on Instagram · @profilopolitics
The Justice Department and the Labor Department announced on Friday a coordinated settlement with Cloudera Inc. that costs the Santa Clara data company $2 million — and bars it from the federal green card sponsorship program for two years — after investigators concluded it shut qualified American workers out of high-paying jobs it was filling with foreign workers.
The case turns on how the PERM program is supposed to work. Before a company can sponsor a foreign employee for permanent residency, it must first test the U.S. labor market and certify that no qualified American worker is available — and federal law, the Immigration and Nationality Act, expressly bars discriminating against U.S. workers in that process.
According to the Justice Department's complaint, filed in April, Cloudera did the opposite. For at least seven software engineering positions in 2024 and 2025 — jobs paying roughly $180,000 to $294,000 a year — the company directed applicants to a dedicated email address, amerijobpostings@cloudera.com, that rejected every outside message with an automated bounce-back error. The roles were not posted on the company's public careers website or run through its standard application portal, the way non-sponsorship jobs were. Then Cloudera attested to the Labor Department that it could not find any qualified U.S. workers. The case began when one American worker whose application bounced back filed a discrimination charge.
The settlement ends it on the government's terms. Cloudera will put $1.4 million into a fund for the qualified U.S. workers who were never considered and pay $600,000 in civil penalties. It is barred from the PERM program for two years — one of the most significant sanctions the Labor Department can impose — on top of enhanced monitoring and reporting requirements. The Labor Department had already suspended Cloudera's PERM processing in an earlier, unprecedented step.
"There are no exceptions: the Justice Department will hold accountable employers who discriminate against U.S. workers," said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division. "This substantial settlement, in partnership with DOL, sends a strong signal to employers that the federal government will work together to ensure employers treat U.S. workers fairly." When the suit was filed, Dhillon put the principle behind it plainly: "Employers cannot use the PERM sponsorship process as a backdoor for discriminating against U.S. workers."
Cloudera is not an isolated target. The settlement is the latest under the Justice Department's Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative, relaunched in 2025, which has already produced agreements with Meta, Apple, and OpenAI — OpenAI paid $3.2 million. The Labor Department has also frozen PERM processing for Microsoft, Adobe, and other tech firms over alleged violations, and the administration says the Cloudera deal — money, penalties, and a two-year ban — is the framework for the enforcement actions that come next.
For decades, the green card pipeline ran on an honor system: companies certified that no American could do the job, and Washington mostly took their word for it. The Cloudera case shows what that word was worth — an inbox rigged to bounce Americans away. The word now comes with a $2 million price tag and a two-year lockout, and every employer running the same play has been told, in Dhillon's words, there are no exceptions.
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