Vice President JD Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling suspended Microsoft, Adobe, and major IT outsourcing firms from a key residency visa track Thursday, citing fraud and the replacement of American workers.

Breitbart News reported that Vance and Attorney General Todd Blanche slammed corporate use of the H-1B and J-1 visa programs, while Sonderling announced suspensions from the Permanent Labor Certification Program that companies use to sponsor foreign workers for residency.

The Labor Department move hit Microsoft and Adobe over multiple active federal investigations, and it also suspended Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCO, and Capgemini, firms Sonderling described as among the largest IT outsourcing companies in the world.

Vance framed the H-1B program as intended for truly hard-to-fill roles with top foreign talent. He said it has instead become rife with fraud over years, and in some cases decades.

He pointed straight at Microsoft’s recent record.

"Unfortunately, the program has become rife with fraud over the last several years, probably the last several decades... Microsoft laid off last year 6,000 American workers. At the same time, the company benefited from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards [for foreign workers].... If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replace that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants."

Vance delivered that line as the administration’s public case for cutting firms off from the permanent labor certification track. The Vice President JD Vance message was blunt: hire American workers.

"Our message to Microsoft is you’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers," he said.

Labor Department cuts firms from permanent labor certification

Sonderling cast the suspensions as a direct strike at long-running abuse. He thanked President Trump, the vice president, and a task force for the action.

"Today, thanks to President Trump, Vice President, and the task force, we are cutting off the head of the snake, the companies that have enabled this abuse for decades."

He then named the companies barred from the Permanent Labor Certification Program.

"I am hereby suspending from the Permanent Labor Certification Program some of the largest IT outsourcing firms in the world: Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCO, and Capgemini. And also, due to multiple active federal investigations, the Department of Labor is suspending Microsoft and Adobe from the program."

Sonderling added volume figures going back to 2009. He said those companies alone had requested almost 3 million foreign workers, received more than 230,000 H-1B visa approvals, and secured more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications, jobs he said were taken from American workers.

The New York Post reported the Trump administration barred Microsoft from the PERM program that allows H-1B workers to pursue green cards, effective immediately, and listed similar suspensions for other IT firms including Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, Capgemini, and Adobe. Microsoft denied the accusations and said most visas were for existing employees.

That denial sits against the administration’s public math on layoffs and visa totals. The gap is the point of the crackdown: officials say the system rewarded firms that shed U.S. payrolls while still pulling in foreign labor through the same pipeline.

Young workers and mid-career Americans in the crosshairs

Attorney General Todd Blanche tied the practice to hiring walls facing younger Americans and to favoritism toward foreign labor. He said the Justice Department would keep pressing the issue.

"This issue has affected Americans across generations, but it’s especially important to young people with a lot of talent who can’t find a job because their potential employer may be engaging in these sort of improper and nefarious practices... The issue of foreign labor favoritism is something that nobody should ignore, and we at the Department of Justice will continue to do our part to make sure that doesn’t happen."

Stephen Miller, speaking alongside the officials, drew the line between welcoming exceptional talent and undercutting Americans who want entry-level or mid-career work. He warned against crushing the ambitions of students and of workers who get short notice when cheaper labor is available overseas.

Miller said America had managed to turn an immigration system from working against its people to working for them, a claim the administration is now testing with enforcement, not slogans. Vance has argued elsewhere that cultural and political fights belong in public life, and this labor fight fits that posture.

Administration officials also say many visa programs keep roughly 2.5 million foreign workers in jobs that would otherwise go to American graduates. That scale is why the suspensions target both marquee tech names and large outsourcing shops.

Nine universities flagged over J-1 use

Vance did not stop at corporate H-1B use. He named nine universities he said merit investigation over J-1 visas and pay gaps on federally funded work.

"There are nine universities in particular that we believe merit an investigation. Those universities are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State, and MIT, and what we see is that when you employ an American worker as a graduate student, as a researcher, they’re making about $20,000 more than someone brought in under a J-1 visa, and importantly, these universities are employing J-1 visas for federally funded grants at a rate of about 61 percent. The national average is 38 percent. So something weird is going on at these universities. They’re using these visas way too much."

Those figures, if borne out in a formal probe, would mean federal grant dollars are flowing through campuses that lean harder on foreign J-1 labor than the national norm while paying American graduate researchers more. Vance presented the pay gap and the 61-versus-38 percent rate as the reason the schools belong on an investigative list.

Just The News reported the Microsoft suspension from the green-card application program tied to H-1B visas over fraud concerns, and said IT outsourcing firms including Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini were also suspended effective Thursday pending investigation. Vance again used the “one and a half foreign indentured servants” comparison and called the arrangement a scandalous system the task force intends to stop.

The supporting accounts align on the core action: immediate suspension from the permanent certification path for Microsoft and a cluster of large outsourcing firms, paired with a public charge that layoffs and visa inflows moved in the wrong direction for American workers.

What the suspensions actually do

The Permanent Labor Certification Program is the federal step employers use to show they could not find willing U.S. workers before sponsoring foreign employees for permanent residency. Suspension from that program blocks that path for the named firms while investigations and policy pressure continue.

Sonderling called the move the first critical step to stop fraud and abuse and to ensure the programs never come at the expense of the American worker. Blanche put the Justice Department on the same side of the ledger. Vance put Microsoft on notice in plain language.

For workers who watched pink slips land while H-1B and green-card totals stayed high, the Thursday announcement is a rare case of senior officials matching rhetoric with a concrete program cutoff. Vance has faced intense personal and political scrutiny in other arenas; here he is using the vice presidency to force a labor fight into the open.

Open questions remain. The record does not spell out the full legal instrument or the detailed scope of the “multiple active federal investigations” into Microsoft and Adobe. It also leaves the exact corporate identity behind the “HCO” label unclear in the source text. What is clear is the named list, the effective posture of suspension, and the administration’s stated reason: stop replacing Americans with cheaper foreign labor through programs sold as last-resort talent tools.

Miller’s warning about mid-career workers getting two weeks’ notice so someone abroad can do the job for a fraction of the pay is the human stake. Blanche’s focus on talented young people locked out of first jobs is the other. The suspensions are the lever.

American workers should not lose careers so corporations can game visa pipelines, and this White House just made that rule expensive to ignore.