Trump Wants H-1B Recipients to Pay Through the Nose

Donald Trump’s administration has a new plan to turn the U.S. immigration system into a moneymaking scheme, ensuring that legal pathways to citizenship are out of reach for low-income immigrants.

The Department of Homeland Security proposed a new rule Monday that would establish a $103,265 fee for immigrants petitioning for a H-1B worker visa.

The proposed fee would be applied to all H-1B visa petitioners, including those already in the United States, according to Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

“This fee would serve as a dedicated revenue mechanism to help recover a portion of the federal government’s costs of administering the lawful immigration system,” according to a federal notice.

The money raised from the fee would be directed to DHS, the Department of Labor, the Department of State, and the Department of Justice. Clearly, the rule is designed as a deterrent as the fee is prohibitively expensive for all but the most affluent.

In June, a federal judge blocked Trump’s original $100,000 H-1B visa fee for employers, finding that the fee was an illegal tax on businesses. It’s not clear why this new proposal wouldn’t be subject to a similar adjudication, as only Congress has the authority to impose taxes—not the president.

Trump has continued to undermine America’s ability to attract and retain talent from other countries. The administration’s racist replacement theories are accomplishing little other than to make our nation poorer and sicker. Meanwhile, one study estimates that H-1B visa holders who arrived between 1990 and 2020 were responsible for 30 percent to 50 percent of all productivity growth in the U.S. economy during that period—as well as spurring wage growth for native workers.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, has become so toxic that even embattled Republicans are shying away from its donations.

The pro-Israel lobbying group has spent millions on an ad campaign to assist Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for Senate in Michigan, in a contentious midterm race against Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed. But Rogers and his team are wavering on the proposed ad expenditure, concerned that any ties to the organization might hurt rather than help him come November, The New York Times reported Monday.

Rogers reportedly brought up his reservations during a meeting last week with the AIPAC board chair, Michael Tuchin. Rogers did not explicitly say that he did not want AIPAC involved in his race, but encouraged the United Democracy Project, the organization’s super PAC, to ease up on its media plan and “give more serious thought to whether the organization is the best messenger” against El-Sayed, according to a source that spoke with the Times.

Bobby Schostak, Rogers’s adviser and fundraising consultant, said in a statement that their campaign welcomes support from AIPAC’s community.

“We have support from the Jewish and pro-Israel community,” he told the Times. “We want that support and will continue to welcome and are proud to have any and all support from the pro-Israel community and AIPAC community.”

Rogers hasn’t completely resisted the organization’s call: On Sunday, the election denier attended three AIPAC-hosted fundraising events in Los Angeles, and has plans to attend another on Monday.

El-Sayed has been a vocal critic of Israel since he entered the race. The progressive firebrand has described the ethnostate’s war against Gaza as a genocide, referred to its government as “evil,” and has argued against providing U.S. military aid to Israel.

AIPAC spent tens of millions of dollars—approximately $32 million via the United Democracy Project—in an unsuccessful bid to defeat El-Sayed in the state’s primary, backing his rival, Haley Stevens. Now, in an extraordinary political shift, the organization is gearing to spend millions more on Republicans rather than Democrats in a hail-mary effort to keep the 41-year-old, Oxford-educated doctor out of Washington.

“Our members remain determined to ensure that voters reject Dr. El-Sayed and his radical anti-Israel agenda in November,” Deryn Sousa, a spokeswoman for AIPAC, told the Times in a statement earlier this month.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford doesn’t care about President Trump’s threat to increase tariffs on cars and trucks produced in Canada.

On Truth Social Monday morning, Trump wrote that “Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years. Their ridiculously high tariffs on our Farmers and farm products has made life impossible for these great American Patriots, and has long created a 60 Billion Dollar Deficit between our two Countries. Not sustainable, and NOT ANYMORE!

“On January First, 2027, Tariffs on all Cars, Trucks, both large and small, Automotive Parts, and Steel, will be increased to 50%. Build in the U.S. and there are ZERO TARIFFS. Canada will be treated like a State no longer! On Trade, and in other ways, also, they are among the worst Nations in the World to deal with,” Trump continued.

In response, Ford told an Ottawa radio show, “Well, he can kiss my ass as far as I’m concerned. We’re going to go at him full steam, and we buy 400 percent more cars than anyone in the world.”

Ford pointed out that Canada exports oil and gas to the U.S. and supplies some states with electricity, and suggested that “maybe what we should be doing is charging him triple on the oil, triple on the potash, on the uranium, on our metals, and our rare earth metals.”

The Canadian politician, a member of the country’s right-wing Conservative Party, invoked former President Ronald Reagan in his rejoinder to Trump.

“We need to throw everything in the kitchen sink at him. He’s arrogant, he’s cocky, and you know, as Ronald Reagan said, ‘If you come to a draw with a bully, what stops that bully from coming after you the next day and the next day? And that’s all Donald Trump is, is a bully. Well, he’s going to have a rude awakening,” Ford said. He also told the Associated Press that Reagan would be “throwing up” from a picture of him Trump keeps in the Oval Office.

“He’d be throwing up on [Trump] from the picture if he knew what was going on, spinning around in his grave right now,” Ford said. “He should maybe take that picture off the wall and move it somewhere else. Because right now, Ronald Reagan would be disgusted with President Trump.”

Ford has invoked Reagan before in taking shots at Trump, using an audio clip from Reagan in October last year in a TV ad where the former president said tariffs only serve to “hurt every American.” The ad enraged Trump enough to end trade talks with Canada at the time.

Over the weekend, Canada halted tariff negotiations with the U.S. over last-minute demands from Trump such as changing Quebec’s French-language protections and the calculation of tariff payments on Canadian cars, among other details. Ford’s comments, coupled with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech to the Canadian people Monday, suggest that the country is not going to back down in this new trade war launched by Trump.

National Guard members are speaking out about their feelings of humiliation and frustration being involved in Donald Trump’s yearlong federal takeover of Washington D.C.

National Public Radio spoke with three National Guard members who were deployed for many months as part of the so-called “D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force”—and surprise, surprise, they hated it.

“I will say very frankly that the bad taste that this mission left in my mouth, it actually embarrasses me to be involved in any way,” one guard member told NPR.

“I don’t want to think about the National Guard. I don’t want to necessarily discuss my affiliation with the National Guard. I don’t want to fulfill my normal National Guard duties just because of the abuses of the National Guard in this D.C. mission,” the guard member added.

After being summoned to address a so-called “crime emergency” in the nation’s capital, the National Guard was quickly looped in on trash pickup and other landscaping duties on the National Mall. So it shouldn’t come as a shock that all three National Guard members expressed skepticism about the reason they were deployed.

“Now, with it being a year, it’s hard to feel like that justification holds any water,” said another guard member. “It feels like the guard is being exploited in a sense.”

One of the guard members criticized Trump’s federal takeover as feeling like a “very authoritarian move.”

Another one of the guardsmen said that their deployment felt like a political stunt, and pointed to the organization’s insertion in Trump’s false narratives about the city. Last month, the National Guard was ordered to patrol the perimeter of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after the president falsely claimed that it had been targeted by vandals.

“I hope that there will be some accounting someday—probably after President Trump is gone—about why we were there, and was it worth it? But none of that is gonna happen right now,” that member said.

The Trump administration has continued to lie about lowering the crime rates in the District of Columbia. Last month, the White House claimed that Washington D.C. had seen one of the steepest homicide drops of any city nationwide in the first six months of the year—but multiple reports have found that’s not true at all.

Last month, the Center for American Progress found that Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard to American cities has cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion and failed to reduce the rate of violent crime. The Trump administration has responded by suing the organization for defamation.

A federal judge filed a temporary restraining order requiring an informant’s immediate return to the United States after he was deported three times—even after he willingly advised the Justice Department on Mexican cartel activity.

The informant, referred to as John Doe, provided “substantial assistance to the Department of Justice … against defendants affiliated with Mexican drug cartels” in 2024, placing his own life on the line for the U.S. government, U.S. District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher wrote. And yet last month, with no prior notice, the Department of Homeland Security deported him to Guatemala before turning him over to Mexican officials—even though a judge ruled over two years ago that he was “more likely than not to be tortured by the government or by individuals acting with the acquiescence of the government if he were returned to Mexico.”

Guatemala refused to accept him as he wasn’t a Guatemalan official, and Mexican officials at the embassy there refused to accept him after learning he had received protection under the Convention Against Torture. Doe was sent back to Texas and shuffled between different holding facilities until DHS tried to send him directly to Mexico around July 15. Mexico again refused. Finally, on August 1, DHS successfully deported Doe back to Mexico, where he has been since—hiding for his life out of fear that “the cartels that he provided information against will find him and torture or kill him before he can return to the United States,” Gallagher noted.

To deport a man risking deadly retribution after helping the U.S. government fight cartels—something the Trump administration claims is a massive priority—is absolutely cruel and unusual.

“A man put himself at enormous risk to turn on the cartels and testify against them, making him a target for a hideous death if they ever got their hands on him. As a result, he got protection under the Convention Against Torture,” American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote on X. “The Trump admin deported him to Mexico anyway.”

Gallagher, a Trump appointee, expressed a similar sentiment in her TRO.

“The record clearly demonstrates that there is an imminent danger of irreparable harm, in the form of potential torture or even death, if Doe is not immediately returned to the United States.... Doe was sent [to] a region of Mexico where there is active cartel activity, without any of his money or personal belongings, reliant on the help of strangers while attempting to remain in hiding,” she wrote. “The Court thus finds that the irreparable harm factor overwhelmingly supports the immediate necessity of ordering Doe’s return to the United States.”