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Trump just screwed the weekend for a whole bunch of corporations: Updated X3 [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-09-20

Let’s pose a hypothetical. Let’s pretend it’s Friday. You’re the CEO of a large US corporation with thousands of employees. You may or may not have employees here on an H-1B visa. Heck, you don’t know, that’s HR’s job right? You may have some, though. If you’re in tech, yes, you know you do. But other big corporations? Maybe, maybe not. You’re not thinking about it, certainly not on a Friday afternoon.

It’s still Friday, and out of the blue, the President of the U.S. issues a Proclamation imposing a fee of $100,000 for any of your H - 1B employees returning to the U.S. If the fee is not paid, that employee is stranded. As noted in India Today:

The rules are clear – enter the US before 12.01 am EDT (9.31 am IST) on September 21. After that, no H-1B worker will be allowed to enter the US unless the sponsoring employer pays the $100,000 fee.

So your legal department tells you that, based on this proclamation, you ostensibly have until 12:01 am Sunday morning to get those employees back into the country. But first you have to find out how many, who they are, and where they are.

You call your HR department head. What if he or she is out? On vacation? Or on PTO? Now what do you do?

You have until 12:01 am Sunday not only to determine who is affected, but to contact every single one of them and get them on a plane. Oh, it has to be run by legal. And the CIO. Where are they, by the way?

Major companies such as Meta and Microsoft went into a huddle on Saturday morning and urged all their H-1B visa holders to not leave the US, at least for at least 14 days, after President Donald Trump launched a fresh crackdown on immigrants and imposed limitations on legal immigration. According to internal mails accessed by NDTV Profit, the companies also urged their employees, who are currently residing outside the US, to return to the country within 24 hours to avoid denial of re-entry.

But it isn’t just Meta and Microsoft. It’s anyone who may (or may not—who knows?) have an employee on such a visa.

Happy?

WTF. Seriously, WTF.

Update: Axios is reporting and Politico is confirming that an unnamed White House official advised the order will not apply to existing visa holders, only new applicants. As Politico reports, this minor point appears to have been omitted from the original Proclamation:

The president’s H-1B announcement on Friday immediately spurred chaos, with companies and immigration lawyers warning travelers to return to the U.S. before midnight on Sunday, when the new policy is scheduled to kick in. The text of the presidential proclamation signed on Friday does not make this distinction between existing visa-holders and future applicants clear, and the administration has not released additional guidance clarifying this narrowed interpretation. According to the proclamation, the secretary of Homeland Security will “restrict decisions on petitions” lacking the new fee for H-1B workers “who are currently outside the United States.”

Someone better tell the corporations, I suppose.

Update 2: Behold the “official” response:

x I am still going to be watching what happens at airports tomorrow. Despite this similarly anonymous statement, the actual federal government has not issued any official guidance to ignore what the text of the proclamation says. The incompetence is staggering. This is governance by chaos.



[image or embed] — Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) September 20, 2025 at 4:12 PM

h/t DRo

Update 3: And now, at last, we have something actually official:

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