Trump Froze Microsoft's Green Cards, Then Medaled Nadella

Vice President JD Vance announced the PERM freeze at an October 8 press conference — and singled out Microsoft for the harshest treatment. (Photo: Emily J. Higgins / The White House, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

It was quite a day for Satya Nadella. On Thursday, Vice President JD Vance stood in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and accused Microsoft — the company Nadella runs — of being the single worst abuser of America's skilled-worker visa system, then froze its ability to sponsor employees for green cards. Hours later, President Trump presented the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Nadella at a Washington ceremony. Enforcement and honors, on the same day, aimed at the same CEO.

The freeze is the sharpest escalation yet in the administration's war on employment-based immigration. On October 8, Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced that the Labor Department will stop accepting — and stop processing — PERM green-card applications involving eight named employers: Microsoft, Adobe, and the six biggest names in IT outsourcing, Cognizant, Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCLTech, and Capgemini. Meta, Amazon, and Google were conspicuously left out. Reuters confirmed they remain free to participate.

For the millions of workers — overwhelmingly Indian — whose path from an H-1B visa to a green card runs through one of these companies, the announcement landed like a thunderclap. For the companies, the response was closer to a shrug. The truth about this freeze is that it is simultaneously the administration's boldest immigration-enforcement move of the year and, in practical terms, a mostly symbolic wound. Understanding both halves is the only honest way to read it.

Eight companies, one press conference, no new green cards

The venue told you everything about how the administration wants this remembered: a White House press conference branded around the administration's Fraud Task Force, with Vance flanked by Sonderling, Attorney General Todd Blanche reportedly present, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller photographed listening in the back of the room. Sonderling framed the action as "historic," telling reporters the department was "shutting down the pipeline of systemic fraud" and declaring: "We are cutting off the head of the snake." He echoed the line online later that day, thanking Trump and Vance, per reporting on his post.

The mechanism is PERM — the Labor Department's permanent labor certification, the standard first step of the most common employer-sponsored green card. The process has three stages: the employer files PERM with DOL proving no qualified American workers are available; then the employer files a Form I-140 with immigration authorities; then the worker adjusts status or goes through consular processing. DOL said it will neither accept new PERM applications nor process pending ones involving the eight companies while investigations continue.

We read Vance's remarks in three separate reports before printing a word of them here, because the quotes are the story. Here is what he said, attributed exactly. At the press conference, Vance told reporters: "Our message to Microsoft is: you're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers. You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants." He went further: "There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft."

And then the arithmetic. "Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers in 2025 after certifying that it could not find qualified American employees — yet the company was approved for more than 6,000 H-1Bs and filed 3,682 PERM applications, including nearly 1,000 applications for the same positions as the laid-off American workers," Vance said. "If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants."

Sonderling brought his own numbers, and they were bigger. "Since 2009, just these companies alone have requested almost 3 million foreign workers. They've received over 230,000 H-1B visa approvals and over 100,000 permanent labour certifications," he said at the press conference. "That's hundreds of thousands of jobs that were taken from American workers," he added.

The shoddiest part is the math

Numbers that specific deserve to be interrogated, and this is where honest journalism has to slow the story down. Reuters noted that Vance made his claims without citing specific evidence. The AP, via UK coverage of the announcement, added the caveat the administration never addressed: officials did not publicly establish that the workers in those visa figures directly replaced the ones who were laid off. Layoffs, H-1B approvals, and green-card filings measure different activities, across different timelines, and do not by themselves establish unlawful hiring practices. A company can lay off 6,000 people in one division and legitimately sponsor 6,300 H-1Bs in another. That is not a defense of Microsoft's hiring; it is the reason enforcement through press conferences is a shoddy substitute for enforcement through investigation.

Vance also drew a bright line between the two programs in a way that matters: "The H-1B visa is how people come into the country. The PERM programme is how they stay in the United States to begin with." Which brings us to the distinction the administration's own supporters keep blurring. This action does not cancel a single existing H-1B visa. It does not deport anyone. PERM is a separate, employer-initiated process, and workers can continue on H-1B status. What the freeze does is block the bridge — the route by which temporary workers, many of them already deep in a decade-long green-card queue, convert to permanent residents.

That is still devastating for the people standing on the bridge. But it is worth being precise about, because precision is the difference between a policy and a performance.

What the companies said back — and what they didn't

Microsoft answered fast, and its answer was essentially: your numbers are ours, but your interpretation is wrong. In a statement Thursday, the company said the "vast majority" of its US-based employees are Americans, and that of the roughly 6,000 H-1B applications it submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% were to "extend or change the status" of existing employees rather than hire new ones. In an extended statement, Microsoft added that its new-employee filings equal "only 1% of our US workforce" and are "not new arrivals to our country," and that it pays H-1B workers the same as comparable Americans — wages it says rank "among the highest of all H-1B filings." Both claims are the company's own, not independently verified, and they do not address Vance's specific charge that PERM filings overlapped with the laid-off positions.

TCS, the biggest of the Indian firms named, was cooler. In a statement Friday — also filed with Indian regulators — the company said it would comply with any Labor Department directive, then effectively argued the freeze is irrelevant to its business: "Our PERM applications were in single digits in the last two years and hence we do not expect the suspension of the program to impact our workforce strategy and customer engagements." The company's US strategy, it said, "is anchored in hiring local talent," with a significant local workforce across 31 offices and delivery centers and plans to hire an additional 15,000 people in the US over the next five years.

The silence from the rest was notable. At the time we compiled this report, we could find no public statements from Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech, Cognizant, Capgemini, or Adobe — the other six named employers. The Indian industry body NASSCOM spoke for them in spirit, arguing that "immigration and skilled talent mobility are two distinct issues," that Indian IT firms have significantly reduced H-1B dependence while expanding local hiring, and that PERM transitions are "relatively limited" in number. Read between the lines: the industry's position is that this freeze punishes a pipeline it barely uses anymore.

'Deeply offensive': India's counterattack

The sharpest words of the week did not come from a company. They came from New Delhi. On Friday, India's Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement that was, by diplomatic standards, furious — and aimed squarely at Vance's language. "Resorting to terminology that carries painful historical and colonial legacy connotations is deeply offensive," the ministry said of the "foreign indentured servants" line, calling the descriptions "unwarranted" and noting that Indian professionals in the US "are highly educated and skilled contributors to its economy and innovation ecosystem." The steps announced, the MEA added, "do not advance the shared ambitions of both countries."

That phrase — "colonial legacy connotations" — is doing real work. Indentured servitude is not an abstraction in Indian history; it is the system that shipped millions of Indian laborers to plantations under British rule. Deploying it as a punchline at a press conference is not just undiplomatic. It is, as the MEA plainly said, offensive.

The MEA also injected precision of its own: PERM is distinct from H-1B, it said, and "the suspension of PERM applications does not, by itself, affect the validity of existing H-1B visas or the status of H-1B visa holders and their dependents" — though it acknowledged the freeze could hit the green-card pipeline for affected employees.

And the markets? They shrugged along with the companies. On Friday, India's Nifty IT index rose more than 3%, with TCS surging over 5% on strong quarterly earnings — a ₹13,884 crore net profit, up 15% — that buried the PERM news entirely. Investors, it seems, read the freeze the way the companies do: noise, not damage.

What this actually freezes — and what it doesn't

For the workers caught in this, the mechanics matter more than the theater. Here is the honest version.

PERM is not the visa; it is the bridge from the visa. If your employer is one of the eight and had not yet started your PERM filing, your green-card clock may have stopped while your H-1B clock keeps running — and H-1Bs generally max out at six years. The hinge is a piece of law called AC21: workers can extend H-1Bs beyond six years if a PERM or I-140 was filed at least 365 days before they hit the cap. So the treatment of pending filings — the applications already in the pipe — is the question that decides actual lives. The administration has, by multiple accounts, yet to clarify what happens to those. That is a botched way to announce a policy that affects tens of thousands of people: freeze first, explain later.

What the freeze cannot touch: workers whose green-card process already cleared the I-140 stage (those petitions are generally not auto-revoked), self-petition routes like EB-1A and the National Interest Waiver, and — for the companies — hiring on H-1Bs themselves, which continues. The October 2026 Visa Bulletin shows the deeper sickness anyway: India-born applicants face final-action dates in 2013–2014 for employment-based categories. The queue was already more than a decade long. This freeze does not lengthen a queue so much as barricade one of its doors.

There is also a legal question nobody on stage answered, and it is the one to watch. Can the Labor Department suspend named companies from PERM by announcement, while investigations are still "underway"? One secondary report points to a regulation that authorizes suspending labor-certification processing during fraud investigations — but the $100,000 one-time H-1B fee the administration imposed last year has already been blocked by federal courts twice, most recently by Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. on October 1. Whatever you think of the freeze's intent, its durability is genuinely in doubt. No outlet we reviewed had an immigration litigator on the record about a due-process challenge. That is the lawsuit to watch for.

The universities, the strike team, and the bigger campaign

The press conference did not stop at companies. The administration is also investigating nine universities — Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State, and MIT — for alleged J-1 exchange-visitor visa fraud. Vance claimed 61% of researchers on federally funded projects at those schools hold J-1s versus a 38% national average, and accused the schools of underpaying American grad students. The Labor Department's inspector general confirmed subpoenas have been served: "investigations are underway, and nobody will be getting a free pass because their name is carved into an expensive building."

This is the pattern to name plainly: the administration is running a whole-of-government pressure campaign on foreign-worker pipelines — companies via PERM, universities via J-1, the $100,000 H-1B fee by proclamation. Each individual action is challengeable, and courts have already killed the fee. The campaign itself, though, does not need any single action to survive. It needs only to make the pipeline feel dangerous. That is what theater is for.

Our take: enforcement by press conference

Here is our judgment, stated plainly. This freeze is enforcement by press conference, and the tells are everywhere. A real fraud crackdown would come with charging documents, named schemes, and indictments — the subpoenas the inspector general mentioned are the one piece of this that looks like genuine enforcement, and they are aimed at universities, not the eight companies. Instead, what the companies got was a statistical ambush: big numbers, scary words, no established link between the layoffs and the visas, and an announcement that the biggest targets can already shrug off. TCS filed single-digit PERMs. Microsoft says its new H-1B hires are 1% of its workforce. If the goal was to hurt the abusers, the weapon missed the targets; if the goal was to dominate the news cycle, it worked perfectly.

The people who will actually pay for it are the ones with the least leverage: workers already years into a green-card queue, whose employers' paperwork now sits frozen while the clock on their visas runs. That is the colossally unfair part, and it is why the MEA's fury — however diplomatically phrased — lands. You do not punish companies by barricading the door their employees are walking through.

And then there is the medal. Hours after accusing Microsoft of being the worst abuser in America, the President decorated its CEO for technological achievement. No administration that takes its own fraud allegations seriously hands the alleged abuser's chief executive a medal the same evening. The contradiction is the story. Everything else is set dressing.

Frequently asked questions

Which companies are affected by the PERM freeze? Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCLTech, and Capgemini. The Labor Department will not accept new PERM applications or process pending ones involving these companies. Meta, Amazon, and Google were not included.

Does this cancel H-1B visas? No. PERM is the labor-certification step toward a green card; it is separate from the H-1B temporary work visa. Existing H-1B visas and petitions are not cancelled by this action, per both US officials and India's MEA.

What happens to pending PERM applications? The department said processing of pending applications will stop while investigations continue, but officials have not yet clarified the details — this is the biggest open question for affected workers.

Can the freeze be challenged in court? Possibly. The administration's related $100,000 H-1B fee was blocked by federal courts twice (most recently October 1, 2026), and immigration lawyers are likely to test whether the Labor Department can suspend named companies by announcement. No challenge had been filed at the time of this report.

Sources: Reuters; USA Today; NY Post; NDTV; The Hindu; Times Now; ET Now; Deccan Herald; Outlook Money; the White House press conference of October 8, 2026.

Related: US vs India: Tariffs, Visas, Deportations — the Full Picture — our September deep-dive on the trade and visa fight this freeze escalates. AI Now Tops US Layoff Charts: 120,136 Jobs Cut This Year — the layoff wave Vance weaponized against Microsoft. Inside Trump's "Super Intelligence Luncheon" — the same White House tech circus, three weeks earlier. America's new 540-day H-1B deference rule — the AC21 mechanics behind what this freeze actually stops. India and the US are heading toward a trade-deal landing point — the diplomatic track running alongside the visa fight.

By Daniel Rao
Daniel covers AI policy, platform security, and the geopolitics of technology for TechPulse USA.

Update, Oct. 10: Delhi's industry body calls it "a big blow" — and the medal math gets messier

The industry response sharpened on Friday. Jijo G. John, chairman of GTech — the industry body representing the majority of software exporters in Kerala — told The Hindu the suspension "is a big blow to Indian companies and their employees working there," adding that it "pours cold water on the dreams of thousands of employees, many of whom have been eagerly waiting for their Green Cards for years." With little recourse against a US government decision, he said GTech will approach the Indian government to take up the industry's concerns with its American counterpart.

The week's other optics also came into sharper focus. The October 8 ceremony at the White House's "Science: A New Golden Age" summit was actually two medals: the National Medal of Science went to Elon Musk, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia's Jensen Huang and AMD's Lisa Su, while the National Medal of Technology and Innovation went to Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Dell's Michael Dell. Five of the six were born outside the United States. Nadella — who arrived in America in 1988 to study, worked his way from a temporary work visa to citizenship, and became Microsoft's third chief executive — thanked Trump on X, writing that he was "humbled to stand alongside so many giants of American innovation."