Vice President JD Vance suspended Microsoft and other firms from green-card pathways Thursday, accusing tech giants of abusing visas to replace American workers.
Standing with Labor Department leaders, Vance said the Trump administration is cutting Microsoft, Adobe, and a slate of major outsourcing companies off from the Permanent Labor Certification program, known as PERM. That program is the main federal route companies use to sponsor foreign workers for green cards.
Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the Department will not accept any new PERM applications from the named firms and will not process pending ones. The move hits companies the administration says have flooded the system with foreign-labor requests while American workers lose ground.
Fox Business reported the announcements from the news conference, where officials framed the suspensions as the opening step in a wider crackdown on H-1B and J-1 visa abuse.
Vance zeroed in on Microsoft. He said no company has abused the system more.
Vice President JD Vance put it this way:
"There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused the system more than Microsoft."
He tied the charge to concrete numbers. Last year, he said, Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers while benefiting from 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards.
Vance added:
"For every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with 1½ foreign indentured servants."
His message was direct. Microsoft is a great American company, he said, but it has to hire great American workers. “You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.”
He returned to the point later, saying Microsoft laid off 6,000 Americans while replacing them with 6,300 H-1B holders. The goal is not to harm the company, Vance said, but to make it thrive by employing fellow Americans.
Microsoft issued a statement soon after the conference. The company said the vast majority of its U.S. employees are Americans and that it looks forward to giving the administration more information.
Of roughly 6,000 H-1B applications it filed in the last fiscal year, Microsoft said 80 percent were to extend or change the status of people already on its payroll. Those were not new hires.
The remaining filings for new employees, the company said, covered people already legally in the United States who chose to join Microsoft. Those filings equal only 1 percent of its U.S. workforce and are not new arrivals. Microsoft said it pays H-1B workers the same as others doing comparable work and that its wages rank among the highest in the category.
The company described its model as building the world’s best technology workforce by hiring Americans and attracting top talent from abroad. The administration is not buying the framing.
Sonderling announced the same freeze for Adobe and several large IT outsourcing firms: Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini, among others. He linked the step to active federal investigations.
Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling stated:
"We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies."
The scale he cited is large. Since 2009, he said, just these companies alone have requested almost 3 million foreign workers. They received more than 230,000 H-1B approvals and more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications.
Sonderling called those hundreds of thousands of jobs taken from American workers. He described the suspensions as the first critical step to stop fraud and abuse and to ensure the programs never come at the expense of the American worker. Under President Trump’s leadership and the task force led with Vance, he said, the administration is ending the fraud that has fueled reliance on foreign labor.
Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito announced a separate track: a historic investigation into alleged J-1 visa fraud at nine major universities. The J-1 is an exchange-visitor visa. Officials say some schools have misused the category to dodge normal employment rules.
The schools named are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State, and MIT. D’Esposito said subpoenas have already been served and investigations are underway.
Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito said:
"Subpoenas have been served, investigations are underway, and nobody will be getting a free pass because their name is carved into an expensive building."
He added that improperly using J-1 classifications to avoid employment obligations, exploit taxpayer-funded programs, and undermine American workers will not be tolerated.
Attorney General Todd Blanche warned that companies or individuals found to have broken U.S. law could face criminal cases.
The same effort includes a proposed $100,000 fee on H-1B visa filings. Texas Congresswoman Beth Van Duyne discussed the fee and pointed to systemic abuses, including active fraud investigations in North Texas.
Officials are also weighing an end to H-4 work permits. Those permits let spouses of H-1B holders take jobs in the United States. Former acting ICE Director Jonathan Fahey addressed the economic impact on American workers if that authority is pulled back.
Vance cast the whole system as a broken promise. Visa programs were meant to give American companies access to the best and brightest, he said. Instead they undercut wages and replace U.S. employees.
Vice President JD Vance said:
"This is a fundamental insult to the American worker and to the American way of life."
He called the current setup a terribly pernicious system that has gone on too long and urged Congress to reform it. The administration already has tools to make the programs work better for Americans, he said, and could do far more if Congress is willing to play ball.
Vance extended the invitation to both parties. If lawmakers want the H-1B program to stop defrauding taxpayers and undercutting wages, he said, get to work. In the meantime the administration will use every authority it has to make the program run as designed.
PERM suspensions do not yank existing green cards or instantly deport anyone. They block the named companies from using the federal certification process to lock in more permanent foreign hires through that channel. H-1B remains a temporary specialty-occupation visa; PERM is the bridge many employers use toward lasting status.
By freezing that bridge for Microsoft, Adobe, and the big outsourcing shops, the Labor Department is raising the cost of treating foreign labor as a first resort. The university subpoenas put elite campuses on notice that exchange visas are not a back door around wage and hiring rules.
Sonderling’s multi-year totals, nearly 3 million requests, hundreds of thousands of approvals, show how routine the pipeline became. Vance’s Microsoft numbers put a single-company face on the same pattern: layoffs on one side of the ledger, new foreign visas and green cards on the other.
Microsoft’s reply stresses that most of its recent H-1B paper was for people already inside the company and that new filings are a thin slice of its U.S. headcount. The administration’s reply is that the overall volume still crowds out Americans and that the program’s original purpose has been warped.
No injuries, arrests, or facility closures were announced. The immediate consequences are administrative: closed PERM doors for the listed firms, live investigations, served subpoenas, a proposed six-figure H-1B fee, and a live debate over spouse work permits. Criminal referrals remain possible if evidence supports them.
The open questions are real. The precise legal instrument behind the PERM freeze was not detailed at the podium. Specific evidence against each company and each university was not laid out in public. Adobe’s full response was not yet on the record beyond outreach. The calendar date attached to “Thursday” was not fixed in the initial reports. Those gaps do not erase the action itself.
What landed Thursday is a clear shift in enforcement posture. The White House and Labor Department are treating high-volume visa use by major tech and outsourcing players as a threat to American wages and jobs, not as neutral global talent management. They are daring Congress to revise the statutes while they tighten the screws with the tools already on the books.
American workers should not have to compete with a federal pipeline that makes them optional. When companies and campuses treat visa programs as a discount labor channel, the administration is right to shut the spigot.
