Another liberal activist federal judge has stepped in to block President Trump’s immigration agenda, this time striking down his $100,000 fee on H-1B visa petitions — a policy designed to protect American workers and stop corporations from using foreign labor as a cheaper substitute.
U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin ruled on June 8 that the fee was unlawful, claiming it amounted to a tax that Congress had not authorized. He also said the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act by putting the policy in place without a public comment period.
The result is another incomprehensible decision from the federal bench: a judge acknowledging that the president has broad authority to restrict the entry of noncitizens, while still blocking one of the tools Trump chose to enforce that authority.
President Trump announced the fee as part of his effort to reform the H-1B system, which has long been criticized as a pipeline for replacing American professionals with foreign workers who will work for cheaper and displace the native workforce.
The fee would have forced companies to think twice before reaching overseas instead of hiring qualified Americans here at home. But Massachusetts and 19 other Democrat-led states sued, and now one judge has wiped out the policy nationwide. Big Tech firms and other chronic exploiters of H-1B visas are no doubt very happy at this news.
This is becoming a familiar pattern. Voters elect Trump to secure the border, restore immigration sanity, and put American workers first. Then activist judges turn around and spit on the will of the people. The fight is not over.
An appeal is currently pending, but the fact that we have to put on this demeaning song-and-dance routine in front of these power-drunk robed lawyers is an outrage. Andrew Jackson would not have taken this, and neither should President Trump.
