Trump Dealt Huge Loss in Effort to Make Money Off of Immigration

A federal judge on Monday blocked President Donald Trump’s exorbitant $100,000 H-1B visa fee.

In a 42-page ruling, Massachusetts District Judge Leo Sorokin ruled that the fee was an illegal tax on businesses and ordered it to be vacated.

Sorokin used the Supreme Court’s justification in its 2012 case National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, concerning fees imposed on Americans who did not sign up for the Affordable Care Act, to argue that the payment was a tax, not a penalty. In his majority opinion in Sebelius, Chief Justice John Roberts concluded that “if the concept of penalty means anything, it means punishment for an unlawful act or omission.”

“Here, the $100,000 payment requirement for all H-1B petitions does not aim to establish that hiring H-1B workers is illegal. The payment is not a penalty, just as the IRS fee in Sebelius was not, because it is not ‘punishment for an unlawful act or omission,’” Sorokin wrote.

Therefore, according to Sorokin, the fee should be considered a tax—which the president lacks the authority to levy without congressional approval. The government had tried to argue that the fee couldn’t be considered a tax, because its purpose was to decrease the number of H-1B applications altogether, not raise revenue. But Sorokin said that argument “falls short.”

“Purpose and effect are different. Moreover, every $100,000 payment made pursuant to the Policy does raise revenue,” he wrote.

The judge ordered that Trump’s illegal directive be “vacated in its entirety.”

The Trump administration announced a $100,000 fee for H1-B visas in September, placing the burden on employers to sponsor college-educated and specialized foreign workers to come to the United States on a temporary basis.

The Trump administration’s efforts to wind down the H1-B visa program is just another way that the president is kneecapping the economy for underbaked reasons that reek of white nationalism. Some research has estimated that the arrival of H1-B visa holders between 1990 and 2020 was responsible for 30 to 50 percent of all productivity growth in the U.S. economy during that period, resulting in wage growth for native workers.

This story has been updated.

One of the worst cryptocurrency scam artists is trying to get a pardon from President Trump.

Sam Bankman-Fried has officially filed with the Justice Department’s Pardon Attorney Office, Bloomberg reports. The co-founder of the cryptocurrency trading site FTX was convicted on fraud and money laundering charges in 2024 and is now serving a 25-year prison sentence.

Whether Trump will pardon Bankman-Fried is an interesting question. The one-time crypto baron dropped millions of dollars on the Democratic Party and various Democratic political campaigns and PACs, as well as a smaller amount of cash on Republicans. That might make it less likely for Trump to extend a pardon, although Trump has pardoned Democrats before, such as former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and Representative Henry Cuellar.

Blagojevich was only able to get a pardon after extensively lobbying the president and conducting a slick PR campaign. Bankman-Fried seems to be trying the same strategy, giving a phone interview to Fox Business on Monday from prison and praising Trump’s Iran airstrikes In March. His real usefulness to Trump, however, is his cryptocurrency background. Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. are making millions through their crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, which could make the president more forgiving of Bankman-Fried.

Last year, Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Zhao probably helped his own cause by helping to boost World Liberty Financial, as well as hiring people in Trump’s orbit to lobby for his own cause. Bankman-Fried now has to hope he has Trump’s attention to become one of the many white-collar criminals and fraudsters the president has let off the hook in his second term.

The FBI is interviewing former Wisconsin poll workers who helped to fuel President Donald Trump’s long-debunked claims of election fraud in 2020, Votebeat reported Monday

David Bolter, a poll worker whose claims about election fraud were included in Trump’s failed 2020 lawsuit seeking to overturn his election loss in Wisconsin, told Votebeat that FBI officials had arrived at his doorstep with questions about how local officials had handled the election.

In his affidavit, Bolter alleged that someone in Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility had announced around midnight on Election Day that a “huge truckload of ballots” was going to be delivered. There has been no additional evidence of this claim, but it became central to some conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

The FBI also spoke to another 2020 poll worker, who Votebeat identified as Christine, in order to allow her to speak freely. Christine has also submitted an affidavit to Trump’s failed lawsuit claiming that she saw election workers continuing to count votes after she’d been told all of the votes were counted.

“I suspected wrongdoing, but I’m not saying that it actually happened,” she told Votebeat. “I’m just one lowly person that was working there.”

A nonpartisan audit of Wisconsin’s 2020 election found that the state’s elections were “safe and secure.” So what is the FBI hoping to find?

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said that the Trump administration’s efforts to revisit these long-debunked claims weren’t actually about uncovering anything new.

“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” he told Votebeat. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.”

The FBI has also reached out to several election officials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city. It’s worth noting that the only people who appear to have plotted voter fraud in Wisconsin were members of Trump’s own team, who cooked up a fake electors plot to undermine the election results.

Immigration czar Tom Homan claimed that reports of inhumane conditions and abuse at the Delaney Hall detention center were false because he went there and had some spaghetti. 

“I went to the bathrooms, I went to the detention area, I went to indoor and outdoor recreation.… I hear a lot of complaining about the food. I went in there unannounced … and had lunch. I sat in the cafeteria with detainees, had the same meal they had—I had my security  detail with me of course—but I had the same tray of food that they had,” Homan said, accusing hundreds of detainees of lying about what’s happening inside the New Jersey detention center. “There was spaghetti and meat sauce, there was green beans, there was charro beans, there was rolls and butter.… Now is it a five-star cuisine? No. But was it a well established meal? Yes it was.” 

Protests have continued outside the privately run detention center for over a week as prisoners endure a hunger and labor strike over allegations of being served rotten food, being pepper-sprayed excessively, and being held in neglectful conditions. 

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has also denied any reports of inhumane conditions, saying earlier this month that there were “only a handful of individuals” going on hunger strike “because they want their ethnic group—or their ethnic-right food. Well, they can go back to their country and get whatever food they want.” 

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka has threatened a lawsuit if the detention center is not shut down.

Texas turning blue wouldn’t have been on any Democrat’s bingo card back in November 2024, when President Donald Trump took the state with 56.2 percent of the vote and Ted Cruz easily held the senator’s seat. But thanks to Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton’s controversial past and the popular progressivism of Democrat James Talarico, the Lone Star State stands a good chance of swinging left come midterm season.

Just ask the Texas lawyer who represented Paxton in his impeachment trial, Dan Cogdell, who endorsed Talarico on Monday.

Paxton “has lost sight of his core mission, which is to represent the people of Texas,” Cogdell said. “Unlike Ken, I believe to my core that James Talarico believes in unity over division and that he knows how to assemble not only Democrats, but Independents and Republicans, and we need that right now.”

Cogdell defended Paxton in his 2023 trial, during which prosecutors alleged the attorney general accepted bribes and used his office to cover up his infidelity. The case saw Paxton impeached by the Texas House of Representatives but acquitted by the state Senate. Cogdell also represented Paxton in a separate securities fraud case, which was settled in 2024 after Paxton was made to pay $300,000 in restitution.

More recently, Paxton was criticized for offering a sweetheart plea deal to a repeated child molester, which would see the offender spend just one day in jail.

It’s difficult to ascertain where the Houston-based Cogdell falls on the political spectrum. He criticized Trump frequently in recent years but gave $6,500 to the hard-right Paxton’s campaign in 2025, according to campaign finance reports. He then gave Talarico’s campaign $1,000 in March.

Talarico appeared thrilled with his new ally, using the defection to petition others to do the same.

“If you voted for John Cornyn, you have a place in this campaign,” he said in a statement. “If you’re a Republican tired of the corruption you’re seeing in government, you have a place in this campaign. Even if you’re Ken Paxton’s impeachment lawyer, you have a place in this campaign.”