WASHINGTON — Thousands of foreign engineers who expected Microsoft to carry them toward permanent residency woke up on Thursday to find that road closed. The Trump administration froze green-card labour filings for Microsoft, Adobe and six of the world’s largest IT outsourcing firms, widening a visa crackdown that it says targets fraud and protects American jobs.
Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the department would stop handling Permanent Labor Certification applications, known as PERM, for Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Capgemini. “We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies,” Sonderling said, Reuters reported.
PERM is the first step for most employment-based green cards. An employer must show that no qualified American worker is available and that hiring a foreign national will not depress local wages. Microsoft is the largest PERM filer in the country, according to Labor Department data, so the freeze lands hardest on its workforce, many of whom already wait close to a year for certification amid a long employment-based green card backlog.
Vice President JD Vance, who chairs the administration’s anti-fraud task force, made Microsoft the centrepiece of the announcement. He said the company laid off about 6,000 American workers in 2025 while benefiting from roughly 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards. Vance said the suspensions would last “as long as it needs to,” adding that the administration wants the companies to change how they hire.
The timing was awkward for the White House. The announcement came hours before President Donald Trump was due to present Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Sonderling said Microsoft and Adobe were suspended because of “multiple active federal investigations” but gave no detail on what those probes have found.
Microsoft pushed back within hours. In a statement, the company said about 80% of the roughly 6,000 H-1B applications it filed in the last fiscal year were to extend or change the status of existing employees, not to hire new people. The remaining filings, it said, were for people already living legally in the US and equal about 1% of its American workforce. “They are not new arrivals to our country,” the company said, according to GeekWire.
The freeze does not cancel existing H-1B visas, and certifications already approved remain valid. What it blocks is the next step for workers whose cases are pending, leaving them in limbo with no stated end date. Immigration lawyers note that federal rules allow the Labor Department to suspend processing during fraud investigations for an initial 180 days, with extensions possible, but the administration has not said which authority it is using.
The impact will be felt sharply in India. Infosys, TCS, Wipro and HCL are among the country’s biggest employers of engineers placed in the US, and the move follows the H-1B visa fee increase that already rattled India’s IT stocks in August. Reuters said the administration also opened probes into nine top universities as part of the same crackdown, which officials said covers abuse of H-1B and J-1 visas, weeks after new limits on F-1 and J-1 students took effect.
Adobe did not respond to a request for comment from Spectrum News. The administration has not identified the specific legal authority behind the suspensions, and no investigation has yet produced a finding of wrongdoing against any of the eight companies.
