Homeland Security is ending rubber-stamp extensions of temporary foreign worker visas so employers must newly justify skipping skilled Americans, a step the agency says protects U.S. workers.
The Department of Homeland Security has issued new regulations that stop agency examiners from automatically deferring to old corporate justifications when companies seek to extend temporary foreign worker visas. Employers filing those extensions must now present fresh reasons for not hiring skilled Americans.
Breitbart News reported the change ends a deference practice that let prior approvals carry forward for years. DHS framed the move as a program-integrity step that better protects U.S. workers and matches administration priorities.
In 2024 alone, DHS received almost 600,000 new and renewal Form I-129 petitions for foreign workers. The government already allows employers to keep a workforce of roughly 2.5 million foreign graduates, including nearly 1 million H-1B workers and spouses.
Under the prior approach, examiners deferred to years-old corporate explanations for using temporary foreign labor. The new rule removes that automatic deference. Companies seeking extensions face a higher chance of requests for evidence and denials if they cannot show current grounds for not filling roles with Americans.
DHS stated its position plainly.
"DHS believes that removing deference [to prior justifications] would enhance program integrity and thereby better protect the interests of U.S. workers, consistent with this Administration’s priorities,"
The Form I-129 petition itself runs 38 pages. Immigration lawyer John Miano, who defends American workers, told reporters the application still does not require proof that an employer tried to hire Americans before seeking a foreign worker. "There isn’t anything like that," he said.
Miano added that real enforcement requires actual checking. "They’ve got to actually check... [and] the cynic in me says they are announcing stuff that won’t have any effect on the companies." He also noted examiners have not even been verifying whether claimed worksites are valid.
That gap matters for taxpayers and lawful graduates who compete for the same skilled jobs, much as broader DHS enforcement disputes have shown when local non-cooperation undercuts federal priorities.
Deference did not appear out of nowhere. President George Bush established the practice in 2004. President Donald Trump ended it in 2017. President Joe Biden restarted it in 2021.
Trump administration figures later pointed to USCIS administrative and targeted site-visit results that tracked non-compliance and fraud. For H-1B extension cases from fiscal year 2022 through fiscal year 2025, the overall combined rate among visited sites was 22.39 percent. During the earlier no-deference window from fiscal year 2018 through fiscal year 2020, the comparable figure was 16.77 percent.
L-1A extension cases showed the same pattern. From fiscal year 2022 through fiscal year 2025 the combined non-compliance and fraud rate among visited sites reached 24.46 percent. From fiscal year 2018 through fiscal year 2020 it was 18.37 percent.
Those numbers sit alongside other administration curbs: limits on foreign students remaining after study, higher fees on universities that obtain work permits for foreign students, large fees on certain H-1B petitions, and requirements that migrants justify extensions of work authorization. Corporate lawyers have persuaded friendly lower-court judges to block nearly all of those reforms, according to the same reporting.
Federal agencies that set clear rules and then enforce them give American workers a fairer shot, a principle that also surfaces when former DHS advisers examine sanctuary policies that weaken assimilation and accountability.
Vice President JD Vance sketched the administration’s view on October 8. He cast the status quo as a deliberate business model, not a side effect.
"I’m sure that everybody here understands the game that is being played: You bring in indentured servants from outside the country, you lay off American workers, and if you’re a corporation, you make a ton of money by undercutting the wages of American workers, replacing them with people who, frankly, shouldn’t be in the United States of America to begin with. This is a terribly pernicious system. It’s gone on for too long."
That critique targets incentives. Cheap temporary labor that displaces U.S. graduates and suppresses pay is not a free-market win. It is a policy failure that rewards firms for looking abroad first.
Umar Saif, CEO of a Pakistani tech firm, put a similar point on X. He said a large share of India’s tech growth came from "gaming the US visa system to cheaply onshore Indian IT workers into American companies." He continued:
"Basically, staffing firms masquerading as IT companies. Washington has finally caught up with this back door. First came the $100,000 fee on certain new H-1B applications. Now, major IT outsourcing firms, Microsoft and Adobe have been suspended from the PERM green-card process over alleged abuse. A visa programme meant to attract skilled talent should never become a back door for cheap staffing."
Saif’s claim about the fee and the PERM suspensions stands as his account; the core policy shift remains the end of automatic deference on extensions.
Migration firm Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy warned clients about operational fallout if the regulation sticks.
"If the regulation is implemented, employers are likely to see a marked increase in Form I-129 requests for evidence (RFEs) and an increased risk of denials, with a particular impact on extension of status petitions; this in turn could disrupt the ability of employers to retain sponsored foreign talent and impede projects and workforce planning."
Jonathan Grode of Green & Spiegel told Forbes the administration "wants to discourage immigration." The Times of India summarized the practical effect for employers and workers: more denials, more documentation, more requests for evidence, and fresh scrutiny of whether the employee and the job still meet H-1B rules.
Those objections focus on corporate convenience and continuity. They do not erase the site-visit findings or the absence of a real "did you try to hire an American" requirement on the core petition. When federal immigration rules bend toward employers who prefer foreign temporary labor, American graduates absorb the cost.
The same accountability standard appears in other DHS fights, including cases where sanctuary-city resistance complicates ICE operations and shifts risk onto officers and the public.
Almost 600,000 Form I-129 filings in a single year is not a niche pipeline. A standing workforce near 2.5 million foreign graduates, with nearly a million H-1B workers and spouses inside it, shapes hiring, wages, and training decisions across technology and other skilled fields.
Ending deference does not ban lawful temporary visas. It requires current justifications instead of recycling old ones. It also raises the odds that non-compliance and fraud get caught earlier, which is the opposite of the rubber-stamp era that followed the 2021 restart of deference.
John Miano’s warning still hangs over the process: announcements without verification change little. Site visits that already found double-digit non-compliance rates show why paper deference failed American workers. The new rule at least forces examiners and employers back to the merits of each extension.
Readers watching federal immigration enforcement more broadly have seen parallel stakes when migrant-policy failures raise security and assimilation risks that ordinary communities then have to live with.
American graduates should not lose jobs and wage leverage because a federal form never asked whether a company tried to hire them first, and because examiners were told to trust last decade’s paperwork. Ending that deference is basic fairness, not hostility to lawful skilled immigration.
