White House Freezes Microsoft, Adobe and Top IT Outsourcers Out of Green-Card Program Over Alleged Visa Fraud

The Trump administration on Thursday froze Microsoft and seven other companies out of the US green-card pipeline, accusing the tech giants of abusing foreign-worker programs to replace American employees with cheaper labor from abroad.

Vice President JD Vance announced the move at a Washington press conference alongside Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling and Attorney General Todd Blanche, saying Microsoft would be barred indefinitely from the Labor Department's PERM program following an investigation led by the federal anti-fraud task force he chairs.

PERM — the Permanent Labor Certification process — is the gateway through which most employment-based green cards flow. Under it, employers must certify that hiring a foreign worker will not harm the wages, working conditions or job opportunities of US workers.

Vance said the probe found Microsoft laid off roughly 6,000 American workers last year while employing some 6,300 non-citizens it had brought in on H-1B visas. "There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused the system more than Microsoft," he said.

According to Vance, Microsoft filed 3,682 PERM applications in 2025 — including nearly 1,000 for the same positions as the workers it had just laid off — and argued those applications were based on misrepresentations about its hiring needs.

The suspension goes well beyond Microsoft. Sonderling said the Labor Department would no longer accept any new or pending permanent labor certification applications from Adobe and six of the world's largest IT outsourcing firms: 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. Since 2009, he said, the suspended companies have requested nearly 3 million foreign workers, received more than 230,000 H-1B visas, and secured over 100,000 certifications for permanent residency.

"We are cutting off the head of the snake, the companies that have enabled this abuse for decades," he added.

Vance also said nine elite universities, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford, would face investigations over alleged misuse of exchange-visitor visas to undercut American wages — widening the crackdown beyond employers to campuses.

Officials stressed that the action targets the green-card pipeline, not the workers themselves: existing H-1B holders are not directly affected, though the path from those visas to permanent residency is now blocked at the affected companies.

Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, HCL, Wipro and Capgemini did not immediately respond to requests for comment; Tata Consultancy Services declined to comment.