US Tech Visa Applications Are Being Put Through the Ringer

WIRED

15-05-2025

May 15, 2025 12:00 PM Silicon Valley's coveted work visas are under heavy scrutiny from the Trump administration, and immigration lawyers say requests for documentation are increasing. Passengers arriving at Newark Liberty International Airport line up at US Customs and Border Protection. Photograph:Since the end of January, Ryan Helgeson, a Chicago-based immigration attorney, has noticed an unusual trend: He's been getting significantly more pushback from US Citizenship and Immigration Services as he files employment visa petitions on behalf of his foreign-born clients.
Helgeson's firm, McEntee Law Group, represents tech workers who hope to emigrate or remain in the US by way of visas granted for specialty occupations or extraordinary abilities. On average, Helgeson's firm files 50 to 75 visa petitions per month. This goes up to as many as 90 per month at the height of 'H-1B season,' when employers enter a lottery for visas on behalf of foreign workers, and candidates then file a formal petition. During his many years of practicing law, Helgeson and his team have occasionally received requests for additional evidence, or RFE's, from USCIS, as a part of the agency's process for vetting applicants.
But since Donald Trump took office and began cracking down on immigration, Helgeson says, there has been 'an absolute increase in the number and rate of RFE's' on the visa petitions he has filed. That tracks with what three other immigration attorneys told WIRED. Whether their clients are applying for H-1B visas, O-1 extraordinary ability visas, intracompany visas for foreigners looking to move to a US office, or visas specific to traders and investors, USCIS has been seeking an increased amount of information from applicants.
This includes more requests for letters of support, certificates of education, and biometric data, immigration lawyers tell WIRED. Some of the pushback is based on 'adverse information' about the applicant or an applicant failing to update their address, lawyers say. But other RFE's are redundant, requesting information that has already been provided. In some cases, attorneys are struggling to determine what else USCIS could be seeking.
'The tone of the requests for evidence has remained the same, but the whole process is overtly more hostile,' Helgeson says. These requests from USCIS can double the amount of time it takes for a visa to be processed, he adds.
It's also expensive to resubmit visa petitions. Matt Doyle, a British-born tech entrepreneur living in Austin, Texas, and one of McEntee Law Group's clients, recently had his EB-1 visa application denied. Now he's having to reapply. Doyle will pay another $4,000 to the government to expedite his reapplication, on top of the $20,000 he says he has already spent in legal fees for him and his family. For now, the law firm is waiving any additional fees.
'I was approved on two out of the three criteria, and they acknowledged [my company's] innovation and uniqueness, but they didn't feel the evidence showed broader impact,' Doyle says. The entrepreneur is now soliciting several additional letters of support from customers and colleagues. He's paying to expedite the process, he says, in the hopes that his visa gets approved before his current extension expires this fall.
'In the 30-plus years combined of me and my legal partner practicing immigration law, we have seen more denials in cases like Matt's within the past few weeks than we had cumulatively seen before in our careers,' Helgeson says.
Immigration lawyers and technologists are concerned that a more restrictive visa process could limit the talent pipeline in Silicon Valley. Around 66 percent of tech workers in the Valley are foreign-born, according to the think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley. US tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are some of the largest recipients of H-1B visas.
H-1B visas are for newly-employed, high-skilled workers. First introduced in 1990, the visas are issued for three years and allow a worker to extend by three years. The allotment is capped at 65,000 per year, with an additional 20,000 available for workers with a master's degree or higher. Workers from India make up the overwhelming majority of H-1B petitioners—73 percent—while workers from China and Hong Kong are the next largest group, at 12 percent.
Proponents of the H-1B say it's a way to fill highly specialized roles within US companies and help those companies remain competitive. Critics say it undercuts the US job market and that the petition process is rife with fraud. During his first presidential run, Trump lambasted the H-1B visa as part of a system that took jobs from Americans and vowed to 'end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program.'
During the Biden administration, H-1B applications jumped up 61 percent, and USCIS began investigating whether multiple applications were being filed for the same visa. Shortly before Biden left office, his administration attempted to modernize the H-1B visa by expanding eligibility categories and speeding up the application process, while also allowing immigration officials to defer to previous approvals on visa extensions. In theory, this would reduce the need for requests for evidence.
The influence of immigrant founders on Silicon Valley is undeniable. Several tech unicorn founders and top CEOs are immigrants, including Sergey Brin, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Max Levchin, and perhaps most famously, Elon Musk. Musk, Trump's unofficial adviser, has expressed support for bringing in outside talent to the US. So has Sriram Krishnan, a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz and currently one of Trump's AI advisers, who posted on X in November that 'anything to remove country caps for green cards / unlock skilled immigration would be huge.' The following month, Trump softened his tone on H-1B's: 'I've always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That's why we have them,' he told the New York Post.
But in the absence of any official policy directives on employment or skill-based visas, and amid a broader crackdown on immigration in the US, attorneys and technologists believe that the administration's hard-line approach is beginning to impact the tech sector.
In late April, Pejman Nozad, an Iranian American who runs a Palo Alto venture capital firm called Pear VC, posted on X that 'too many Pear VC founders are getting their visas challenged—and it's downright absurd. Entrepreneurs build America, so let's open the doors for innovators, not shut them!' Nozad tagged Musk and David Sacks, a South African–born venture capitalist and Trump's AI and crypto czar. (Nozad declined to elaborate on his remarks when contacted by WIRED, saying that the founders he was referring to were too nervous to speak out.)
Aizada Marat, a lawyer and cofounder of the firm Alma Immigration in Menlo Park, California, says her firm processes 'hundreds' of visa petitions per month, including extraordinary ability visas like the O-1 visas and EB-1. Marat says that her firm has seen a recent jump in RFEs, estimating that last year 8 percent of petitions were sent back with RFEs and that this year, the number has nearly doubled.
'It's alarming,' Marat says.
Marat recently filed an O-1 visa petition on behalf of a client who was a board member of a national bank in their home country and who had raised venture capital funding from well-known angel investors and VCs in order to start a company in the US. She says the person's accomplishments were well-documented in the press. USCIS rejected their application—twice—due to a supposed lack of evidence, Marat says. She resubmitted a third time, and the visa was later granted. If it had been denied again, she planned to sue USCIS.
'We suspect the agency is just rejecting certain petitions without reading through them first, and asking for more evidence right off the bat,' Marat says. 'It has definitely changed since the [2024 US presidential] election.'
Nell Barker, a partner and immigration lawyer at the Chicago-based firm Kempster, Corcoran, Quiceno & Lenz-Calvo, works with academics and tech workers filing for visas. She recently received a request for more information on a postdoctoral researcher who was applying for an H-1B. She says USCIS was seeking more evidence certifying that the person's degree supported their work in the field. 'If the person is a postdoc in physics, they likely studied physics,' Barker says dryly.
Another client of Barker's who was petitioning for an H-1B received notice that USCIS couldn't process the application until the client presented in person at an application support center and submitted their biometric data, including a photograph and fingerprint scan. Barker says this request for biometrics is standard for many types of visa applications, including green cards, but it's 'new for I-129 applicants,' meaning employer-led visa petitions.
At the time of publication, USCIS hadn't responded to WIRED's request for information about the increase in RFE's.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization with more than 16,000 members, recently acknowledged the uptick in RFEs. In early May, the AILA put out a practice advisory to its members, telling them that 'while the information being requested on RFEs may appear duplicative, RFEs must still be responded to in order to prevent any application or petition denials.'
USCIS told the AILA that 'as part of the Trump administration's commitment to restoring integrity to our immigration system, we are increasing the screening and vetting of all aliens filing for immigration benefits and reserve the right to request additional information and conduct additional security checks at any point in the immigration lifecycle,' according to a copy of the advisory viewed by WIRED. The agency said that collecting beneficiary information and biometric data is a necessary part of USCIS's efforts to promote national security and public safety and to mitigate fraud.
Some lawyers say that the jump in RFEs is unsurprising: It happened with certain visa categories during Trump's first term, too. The Massachusetts law firm Parker Gallini noted that from 2016 through 2021 the RFE rate for H-1B's doubled, based on USCIS data. H1-B final approvals also dropped to 85 percent, down from 94 percent, during Trump's first term. But other visa categories, like the one for extraordinary abilities, only saw single-digit increases in RFEs during Trump's first term, and RFE's actually rose from 26 percent during Trump's term to 31 percent during the early months of Biden's presidency.
While requests for evidence from USCIS appear to be on the rise again, it's too soon to determine if outright visa denials will increase as well. Still, immigration attorneys say, the effects of a more stringent petition process are already being felt by their clients.
'I do think a lot of what the administration is doing, between a surge in RFEs, USCIS staff cuts, and erratic immigration policies, is a deterrent for both foreign talent and US employers,' says Ayda Akalin, a Los Angeles–based lawyer at LandUS Law who has also encountered more RFEs in her practice. 'And this is ultimately bad for the US economy and harmful to American companies, particularly those in tech and the creative industries.'
Helgeson also believes this will have a 'chilling effect' on the US tech industry, especially for young people who might have once found their way into the US through the education system and remained in the US on specialty visas to build companies.
'A lot of people are reconsidering right now whether they want to deal with this uncertainty,' he says. 'If the administration gets its way, the US risks becoming a technological backwater. And the talent will just drain.'