Trump Administration Suspends Microsoft, Adobe, and IT Firms from Green Card Sponsorship Program, Citing Alleged Fraud
The Trump administration announced on October 8, 2026, that it is suspending Microsoft, Adobe, Infosys, and several other IT outsourcing firms from the Labor Department's PERM program, which allows employers to sponsor foreign workers for permanent U.S. residency. Vice President JD Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling made the announcement at a White House news conference, citing active fraud investigations into the companies' hiring practices. The suspension means any new or pending permanent residency applications from these companies will not be considered.
The Trump administration's Fraud Task Force, chaired by Vice President JD Vance, announced the suspensions of Microsoft, Adobe, and a group of major IT staffing firms — including Infosys, Cognizant, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini — from the Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) program, which requires employers to demonstrate that no comparable U.S. workers are available before sponsoring a foreign employee for a green card. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said at the news conference, "We are cutting off the head of the snake, the companies that have enabled this abuse for decades."
Vance specifically focused on Microsoft, stating that the company laid off approximately 6,000 American workers last year while simultaneously obtaining 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards. "If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants," Vance said. He argued that companies exploit the PERM program by advertising open positions in small-circulation outlets to manufacture a lack of domestic applicants, then using that result to justify hiring foreign workers. Vance said the suspension would last "as long as it needs to" and did not specify what steps the companies would need to take to regain access.
Microsoft disputed the characterization. In a post on its website, the company said that 80% of its approximately 6,000 H-1B applications in the last fiscal year were to extend or change the status of existing employees, not to hire new ones, and that the remainder were for workers already legally in the United States. "We pay our employees some of the highest compensation in the tech sector, and our wages are among the highest of all H-1B filings," the company wrote. "We pay our H-1B employees the same as any other employees doing comparable work." The Washington Post noted that Vance did not present evidence that Microsoft had specifically laid off U.S. workers and replaced them with foreign employees through the H-1B program.