H‑1B Investigations Jump

The federal government is opening far more investigations into employers that use the H-1B visa, and the jump happened fast: a Labor Department official said the caseload is up 48% since Project Firewall began in September 2025. Immigration lawyers told Bloomberg Law they are also seeing more site visits and more detailed document requests. (bloomberglaw.com) Project Firewall is the Labor Department’s special enforcement push for the H-1B program, which lets United States employers hire foreign workers in specialty jobs such as software engineering, medicine, and finance. The agency says the project is meant to protect the wages and job opportunities of highly skilled American workers and “maximize compliance” with H-1B rules. (dol.gov) The change is not just more audits. On September 19, 2025, the Labor Department said the Secretary of Labor would personally certify the start of certain investigations for the first time in the department’s history, which gives the agency a way to open cases even when no worker complaint has started the process. (dol.gov) That matters because the H-1B system runs on employer promises filed with the government before a visa petition moves forward. In a Labor Condition Application, an employer attests that it will pay the required wage, give notice at the worksite, and avoid harming similarly employed United States workers through certain strikes, lockouts, or displacement rules. (dol.gov) The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division is the part that checks whether those promises were true in real life. Its authority covers wage violations, notice failures, recordkeeping, misstatements on Labor Condition Applications, and certain cases involving workers placed at third-party client sites. (dol.gov) Before Project Firewall, many employers treated H-1B enforcement as something that usually followed a complaint. Law firms tracking the rollout say the new model is more proactive, more documentation-heavy, and more likely to involve referrals, filings, or other information that gives the department “reasonable cause” to investigate. (fragomen.com) (huschblackwell.com) The practical effect is that an H-1B sponsor now has to be ready to prove the paper trail matches the actual job. That means the wage in payroll records has to match the wage promised on the Labor Condition Application, the work location has to match the filing, and the required public access file has to be complete and available. (dol.gov) (burr.com) The government is also coordinating across agencies more openly than before. The Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General says its foreign labor certification investigations look for falsified visa-related labor filings, and the department said in November 2025 that Project Firewall had already fed into a partnership that produced Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforcement activity. (oig.dol.gov) (dol.gov) So this story is not about one new rule on one form. It is about a shift from a system that often reacted after a complaint to one that is increasingly scanning for mismatches on its own, with a caseload that Bloomberg Law says is already up nearly half in about seven months. (bloomberglaw.com) (dol.gov)