The Trump administration's Labor Department wants credit for finally going after H-1B abuse, and on the numbers alone it's a real shift: 175 open investigations under a program called Project Firewall, launched in September 2025, with more than $15 million in back wages already identified as owed to workers. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer says her department is "using every resource currently at our disposal to stop H-1B visa abuse," and for the first time she's personally certifying investigations through a mechanism that, by DOL's own account, had never been used this way before.
But read past the press-release framing and the more revealing number isn't 175 — it's the list of what investigators say they're finding. Employers who paid workers with advanced degrees well below the wage listed on their own job description. Companies that never told USCIS when an H-1B employee was terminated, sometimes for extended periods. Labor Condition Applications listing work sites that don't exist. Workers who had no idea what position they'd technically been filed for. "Benching" — leaving H-1B holders unpaid between projects while their status nominally continues. None of this is a rogue actor here or there. It's a pattern that describes an entire submerged layer of the program operating on paperwork that nobody was checking.
That's the part worth dwelling on. The H-1B program has always run on a trust-but-don't-really-verify model: employers self-attest wage levels and work locations on the LCA, and enforcement has historically been thin enough that gaming the paperwork carried little real risk. Generic job postings written to look like a good-faith American hiring search, but calibrated to fail so the H-1B candidate already earmarked for the role can be justified — that's not a loophole being newly discovered in 2026. It's a known playbook that a serious investigative apparatus is only now getting resourced to chase down.
"The Labor Department is using every resource currently at our disposal to stop H-1B visa abuse." — Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer
The administration has paired this enforcement push with a policy lever too: a new $100,000 one-time fee on H-1B petitions, signed by President Trump, meant to raise the cost of using the program as a default wage-arbitrage tool rather than a narrow fix for genuine shortages. Whatever you think of the fee's design, the logic behind it and behind Project Firewall is the same — for years, the incentives ran entirely in favor of employers who wanted cheap, compliant labor with minimal oversight, and against the American workers whose jobs and wages that labor was quietly undercutting.
It's fair to ask why it took this long, and fair to be skeptical that 175 investigations will be enough to change behavior across an employer base that has used the program at scale for two decades. But the specifics coming out of these cases — underpayment relative to filed job descriptions, phantom worksites, unreported terminations — are exactly the abuses that critics of the program have been describing anecdotally for years while being told the system was basically sound. It wasn't a coincidence that so many workers ended up underpaid relative to their own paperwork. It was the paperwork doing what it was quietly designed to do.
Read the original reporting: Trump Admin Reveals Over 100 Investigations Into H-1B Abuses.