The Justice Department's civil rights arm has made anti-American hiring discrimination its top enforcement priority, a shift that puts Fortune 20 companies on notice and reframes national-origin protections to include U.S. citizens.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon told interviewer Sara Gonzales that the DOJ Civil Rights Section has dramatically escalated investigations into employers who systematically pass over American workers in favor of cheaper foreign labor brought in through visa programs. Dhillon, who spent 25 years working in Silicon Valley before joining the administration, described the enforcement push in blunt terms.
"We have absolutely ramped this up big time, and it's our main focus."
The campaign marks a sharp break from the prior administration's approach. Dhillon stated that before this administration, the DOJ, the Department of Labor, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission did not treat discrimination against Americans as a form of national-origin discrimination under federal employment law. She argued that interpretation was wrong on its face.
"American is a national origin. Whether you're a naturalized citizen or you're born here, that's a nationality. And if we're being undercut by cheaper foreign labor systematically, that's an employment discrimination matter."
That legal reasoning now drives active enforcement. Dhillon said the DOJ is coordinating with both the EEOC and the Department of Labor, and she disclosed that the department is already in conciliation, a formal resolution process, with unnamed Fortune 20 companies over anti-American hiring practices. She declined to name the companies involved.
The most detailed portion of Dhillon's remarks laid out the economics of how visa workers are layered into corporate America through subcontracting middlemen she called "body shops." Drawing on her quarter-century in Silicon Valley, Dhillon described a system in which three or four intermediary staffing firms sit between a Fortune 500 company and the foreign worker who actually does the job.
"I used to call them software pimps when I was there... That body shop may need to fill a job [but] they can't find those people because each of them can sponsor so many at a time, and so [the body shops] trade these human beings like currency."
The math, as Dhillon explained it, works like this: a visa worker might earn $60 to $70 an hour, but each of the two or three intermediary body shops takes a $10 cut on top of that. The Fortune 500 company at the top of the chain ends up paying what looks like a competitive wage, except the money flows to middlemen, not to the worker. And the worker has no leverage to complain.
"He can't do anything about it because if he loses his H-1B position, then he gets deported, and so he will shut up and and and not complain. So it is a form of human trafficking, and Congress could stop this and probably should reform this system, which is rife with abuse the way it is currently being practiced."
Dhillon also pointed to kickback schemes and contracting preferences she called "wrong-headed pressure tactics" imposed on Fortune 500 companies by large pension funds such as Calpers, the California state employees' retirement system. Those preferences, she said, favor women-owned or minority-owned subcontractors and likely persist in states like California.
The DOJ enforcement push does not stand alone. Department of Labor Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito, in an interview at his Washington office in July, described the scope of visa program fraud in far starker terms than typical bureaucratic caution allows.
"This is not just fraud: This is a criminal enterprise that stretches far beyond the borders of America."
D'Esposito said his office is investigating numerous allegations of fraud and criminal activity within visa programs. He hinted that the completed investigation would reveal direct connections between individuals selling jobs and collecting kickbacks and organized criminal groups, including gangs and transnational criminal organizations. He predicted the findings would provoke both public anger and congressional action.
"Without revealing too much of an investigation, I think that when complete, one of the things that will probably make the American people most angry... and will probably lead to the biggest change from lawmakers... [is] the fact that many of the individuals that you're talking about that are selling these jobs, getting kickbacks. We will clearly outline and define their relationships with, whether it's gangs [or] whether it is transnational criminal organizations."
A recent federal conviction illustrates the kind of conduct under scrutiny. The government convicted an Indian migrant for selling a job to another Indian migrant at Optum, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group that helps manage health care for U.S. veterans. The case demonstrated that the kickback economy Dhillon described is not theoretical, it is prosecutable.
Dhillon went out of her way to note that the problem crosses party lines. Employers on both sides of the political spectrum benefit from the wage gap between American and foreign workers, she said, and both resist enforcement for the same reason: it protects their bottom line.
"I want to be very clear here. The dirty secret here is that employers who are conservative, employers who are liberal, they're all benefiting from paying a lower wage to foreigners, and they're trying to protect their bottom line. But it's the job of our lawmakers in Congress to make sure that the American worker is protected; we have those laws on the books."
That candor matters because it removes the usual partisan escape hatch. The issue is not left versus right at the corporate level. It is employers versus workers, and the federal government, for the first time, is treating the workers' side as a civil rights matter rather than an immigration technicality.
The scale of displacement is significant. More than 1.5 million visa workers currently hold jobs in place of Americans. The H-1B program alone keeps at least 730,000 migrants in positions that would otherwise go to American workers, with at least 150,000 additional jobs held by spouses of H-1B holders. Meanwhile, unemployment and underemployment among American computer science graduates has spiked to 26 percent, a figure drawn from New York Federal Reserve data.
Kevin Lynn, founder of the advocacy group U.S. Tech Workers, praised Dhillon's work within the limits of her authority.
"To the fullest extent of the law, she's doing a great deal."
Lynn described progress on two fronts. Voters are becoming energized on the visa worker issue, he said, making it a losing electoral position for any candidate, especially Republicans, to defend the current system. That political pressure, in turn, is pushing the administration to treat enforcement as a priority rather than an afterthought.
Dhillon herself acknowledged the limits of executive enforcement. Federal law does not currently require companies to prove that no qualified American is available before hiring a visa worker. That gap means the DOJ is using existing anti-discrimination statutes, national-origin protections that were always on the books, to do work that a properly written visa law would handle directly. Vice President JD Vance has pushed for pro-American reforms, including a proposed $103,265 fee for H-1B visas, and the White House has moved forward with regulations aimed at curbing fraud in white-collar migration programs.
Not everyone welcomes the shift. Vanita Gupta, who led the DOJ Civil Rights Division during the Biden administration and served as Associate Attorney General, accused Dhillon of turning the division against the people it was created to serve. The New York Times quoted Gupta's criticism.
"Harmeet is not just ignoring the reasons the [civil rights] division was created and the laws it is tasked with enforcing, she is using its enforcement authority against the very people whose rights the division was created to protect."
Gupta's objection rests on a premise that Dhillon directly challenged: that "national origin" protections under federal civil rights law were never meant to cover Americans. Dhillon's counter is straightforward. American is a national origin. The statute does not carve out exceptions for the majority. And if employers are systematically replacing American workers with cheaper foreign labor, the civil rights framework applies whether the prior administration chose to use it or not.
The disagreement is not a legal footnote. It defines whether the federal government's civil rights apparatus exists to protect all workers equally or only selected groups. Under the current administration, the answer is all workers, including the ones born here.
When the government starts treating American workers as a protected class under laws that already say they are, the only people with reason to object are the ones who were profiting from pretending otherwise.
