Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and the Trump Justice Department are taking action against Instacart over alleged hiring discrimination against American workers. Under a $5 million settlement announced Tuesday by the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Instacart will put $4 million into a fund for affected American workers and pay another $1 million in civil penalties, and the company will be subject to federal monitoring.
The allegations centre on the company's hiring for jobs in the PERM process — the federal labor certification an employer must complete before sponsoring a foreign worker for a green card, which requires the employer to first test the U.S. labor market for qualified American applicants. Investigators said Instacart's process required American applicants to submit paper applications by mail while foreign visa holders could apply online — a slower, harder route for the very workers the process exists to protect. The alleged practices ran from December 2023 to February 2026. Under the settlement, Instacart must accept online applications for the jobs it advertises in the green-card process.
"The Justice Department is holding companies who prefer workers with temporary employment visas accountable." — Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon
The case lands in the middle of the administration's wider campaign against citizenship-status discrimination in hiring, in which the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has pursued companies it says tilted their recruitment toward temporary visa holders and away from American workers. The Instacart settlement is among the largest of its kind, measured both by the size of the worker fund and by the length of the period the practice allegedly ran.
The case sends a serious message to employers: hiring procedures must comply with federal law, and American workers must not be unfairly disadvantaged because of their citizenship. Now the focus turns to accountability, and to ensuring that job opportunities are accessible under fair and lawful hiring practices — with the same application door open to everyone.