$ 3,800 aborted flights and takeoffs: how Trump’s H-1B announcement panicked technological workers
After six weeks The Xayun work trip, an employee of a semiconductor company in Silicon Valley, had landed in her hometown in China for holidays when she saw the news on H-1B visas. Friday afternoon, US President Donald Trump signed a proclamation saying that the entry of any H-1B visa holder in the United States will be “limited, with the exception of foreigners whose petitions are accompanied or compared by a payment of $ 100,000”. The news left Xayun and hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers rushing to understand how they would have been affected and if they were abroad, they should come back before Sunday, when the new rule had to take effect.
Xiayun, who asked to use his online alias and not mention the name of her employer in history to avoid being identified, says that she began to receive communications from her manager asking her to consider returning as soon as possible to avoid being charged. Before even meeting her family at the airport, she said that she has already decided to return to the United States as soon as possible. She only stayed in Urumqi two hours before jumping on the next return flight to California.
“I was looking forward to traveling with my parents for a long time, but the reality is that I cannot leave my husband, my cat, my house, my friends and my work in the United States,” she said Wired.
H-1B is one of the most common work visas, issued to skilled workers looking for a temporary residence in the United States up to three years, with the possibility of continuous employment renewal. In 2019, citizenship and immigration services in the United States (USCIS) estimated that there were more than 580,000 immigrants with H-1B visas in the country. Silicon Valley companies are the largest users of the program, according to the data collected by the USCIS on employers who had the most H-1B visas approved each year. During the 2025 financial year, the best companies sponsoring new H-1B visas included Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Google.
Friday evening, Microsoft, Google and Amazon had sent urgent communications to foreign employees, according to emails examined by Wired, advising them to return to the United States before the deadline in the proclamation.
Contradictory messages have left the White House, from the American secretary to trade Howard Lunick, the press secretary Karoline Leavitt and other government accounts on social networks. “Things are changing every hour, every 30 minutes,” said Steven Brown, an immigration lawyer from Reddy Neumann Brown PC. Lutnick said the costs of $ 100,000 would be billed each year, others said it was a single charge; The original proclamation did not exempt current visa holders, but follow -up announcements have done so. Contradictions and new developments have left the workers of legal immigrants, their families and employers do not know what to believe last weekend.
Wired spoke to six H-1B visa holders who have made last minute decisions to return to the United States for holidays or work trips before the new policy settled. Everyone asked to be identified with only their first or family names in this story, fearing that the denunciation of the administration leads to reprisals. While the explanations published by the administration on Saturday afternoon said that most of the H-1B visa holders who were outside the country at the time did not really need to rush, they claim that at that time, they had already lost thousands of dollars to change their travel plans and spent two days in emotional stress.
