Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling put Big Tech on notice Thursday: the Department of Labor is suspending Microsoft, Adobe, and six of the world's largest IT outsourcing firms from the green card pipeline over alleged visa fraud — and the administration says criminal charges are on the table for anyone caught gaming the system.
Watch: Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announces the suspensions (CBS6 Albany).
Standing alongside Vice President JD Vance at a White House briefing on October 8, Sonderling announced the eight companies are barred from the Permanent Labor Certification program, known as PERM — the first step most employers take to sponsor a foreign worker for a green card. No new applications will be accepted, and pending ones will not be processed while federal investigations run their course. "I am hereby suspending from the permanent labor certification program some of the largest IT outsourcing firms in the world — Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini," Sonderling said, adding that Microsoft and Adobe face suspension "due to multiple active federal investigations."
Sonderling said the department is "shutting down the pipeline of systemic fraud" and accused universities and companies that abuse the system of turning into "visa mills" — operations that bring in foreign workers who, he said, have lied about their qualifications to take jobs from American workers. He thanked President Trump and Vance for "cutting off the head of the snake."
Vance aimed his fire directly at Microsoft. "There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft," he said. The numbers he laid out were blunt: Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers in 2025 after certifying it could not find qualified Americans — then received more than 6,000 H-1B approvals and filed 3,682 PERM applications, including nearly 1,000 for the same positions it claimed no American could fill. Vance added that H-1B workers earn about $20,000 less than Americans in the same job, and workers brought in through foreign outsourcing firms earn $48,000 less. "You bring in indentured servants from outside the country, you lay off American workers, and you make a ton of money by undercutting the wages of American workers," Vance said.
The scale, according to Sonderling: since 2009, these companies alone have requested almost 3 million foreign workers, received over 230,000 H-1B approvals, and obtained more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications. Vance credited Sonderling's department with uncovering about $20 billion in fraud and securing over 200 convictions in five months.
Watch: Vance and Sonderling lay out the case against the eight firms.
The crackdown goes beyond the eight companies. Labor Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito announced a dedicated visa fraud strike team, saying investigations since Vance's anti-fraud task force began have contributed to 171 indictments, 203 convictions, and 80 arrests. Nine elite universities, including Harvard and Yale, are also under investigation over alleged fraud in the J-1 student visa program.
Microsoft pushed back. The company said it files H-1B petitions only for people who meet the visa's standards, pays them the same as comparable colleagues, and noted that about 80 percent of its roughly 6,000 H-1B applications in the last fiscal year were extensions or status changes for people it already employed — with new hires equaling about 1 percent of its U.S. workforce. Most of its U.S. employees, it said, are Americans.
The administration isn't waiting for the investigations to finish before acting. Vance said the suspensions last "as long as it needs to," with tools to extend them indefinitely. For American workers who watched their jobs go overseas while being told no qualified American existed, the message from the White House is simple: those days are over.