Employers See Spike in Labor Department Immigration Enforcement

Employers using the H-1B program to tap foreign talent are facing more intense investigations from the Labor Department, showing the agency is now taking a stronger hand in the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

According to a DOL official, the department has marked a 48% increase in its caseload of H-1B investigations since it launched Project Firewall last year and immigration attorneys said their clients have seen a drastic increase in the number of site visits as well as more complicated, data-driven information inquiries.

The enforcement project targets violations of the H-1B specialty occupation visa program most heavily used by tech giants like Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Inc, and Meta Platforms, threatening fines and debarment from the program for violators.

The initiative shifts the DOL’s H-1B investigations from being driven by and focused on complaints from workers or external parties to a more aggressive internally-launched program that’s more difficult to navigate, creating a compliance minefield for companies seeking to hire foreign workers.

“They’re not focusing on just drugs and thugs anymore. They’re looking for hyper-technical violations,” said immigration attorney Kevin Andrews, adding that the government’s new AI contracts are adding an “extra level of seriousness” for employers.

Project Firewall investigations, some of which Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer has personally signed off on, work with other agencies as part of an effort to crackdown on fraud or abuse in immigration programs with renewed efficiency gained through AI systems, attorneys say.

The administration has broadly ratcheted up scrutiny of the H-1B program in particular, which allows foreign workers to fill jobs in industries like tech, health care, finance, and education. It also recently proposed rehousing the Office of Foreign Labor Certification, which administers the foreign hiring programs, under the Labor Secretary’s office to promote “faster decision-making.”

A DOL official declined to comment on specific enforcement tactics or measures.

Enforcement Landscape

Project Firewall investigations are launched by the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division, but employer site visits may also be conducted by US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

According to the DOL, investigators prioritize cases where employers may be failing to recruit US workers in good faith, giving preference to immigrant workers, retaliating against those who raise concerns, and misrepresenting job duties, requirements, or working conditions.

On the ground, employers are experiencing site visits from the Department of Homeland Security and DOL more frequently and responding to information requests that are broader than ever before.

Nandini Nair, an immigration attorney with A.Y. Strauss who represents clients in the IT consulting sector, said some companies are receiving site visits every time they file a new H-1B petition. Officials usually start by asking for information pertaining to one employee, but this quickly broadens out to requests for the immigration and payroll records of all the company’s employees.

“The scope has increased tremendously,” she said.

Brian Coughlin, an immigration attorney with Fisher Phillips, said DHS’s Fraud Detection and National Security officers historically were interested in whether a worker was physically on site and performing the duties that were declared on the visa petition, but recently they’ve been asking supervisors more detailed questions, including what kind of qualifications a worker needs for a given position.

Answers given on site are then being compared against those given by an employer on H-1B petitions, according to Coughlin. If they are different, it could raise red flags to the government.

“No one can be prepared for it other than to understand that they shouldn’t just casually answer questions when it comes to minimum requirements or really anything else,” he said. “It’s better to slow it down and look at the filing that was submitted to make sure that the government’s getting the correct information and a consistent message.”

Technological Changes

The DOL is also benefiting from collaboration with other agencies, such as accessing AI technology used by DHS, which contracted with Palantir Technologies Inc. to boost its enforcement efforts.

This inter-agency coordination means investigators are watching employers for any mistakes or inconsistencies in petitions for foreign workers.

USCIS altered its Form I-129 this year to ask employers questions about job requirements including education, years of experience, technical skills, and supervisory roles. Coughlin said these questions directly line up with criteria the DOL would use to calculate a worker’s prevailing wage, which is information USCIS has never collected before.

With information sharing across agencies and new data analytic software powered by AI, DHS is primed to easily identify any mismatch in an employer’s answers. Any discrepancy could be referred back to DOL for further investigation, Coughlin said, calling the development “potentially catastrophic” for a company.

“Employers and lawyers need to understand that what used to be a lot of disparate filing made for an individual over the course of years, is now all going to be one cohesive narrative that needs to work together,” he said. “It seems pretty obvious that they’re going to start looking holistically at anything the government’s ever received on behalf of a worker to find ways they can poke holes in it.”

Prevailing Wage Rule

The DOL recently rolled out a new proposal for prevailing wage levels that would boost salaries for H-1B workers, adding another compliance obstacle for employers. DOL’s main role in the H-1B process is to ensure employees on visas are paid the prevailing wage and don’t displace American workers.

Jorge Lopez, chair of the Global Mobility & Immigration Practice Group at Littler Mendelson PC, said enforcement actions may not begin in earnest until the second half of this year. “A lot of this is just kicking off.”

Attorneys say the proposed wage rule would likely discourage employers from hiring immigrant workers.

“There’s a second, third, fourth look at whether they actually want to be engaging with a foreign national sponsorship,” Nair said.