Vance: Microsoft, Adobe Suspended From Foreign Worker Green Card Program– The Epoch Times

Vice President JD Vance speaks during a White House Anti-Fraud Task Force press conference in the South Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington on Oct. 8, 2026. Travis Gillmore/The Epoch Times

Vice President JD Vance has announced that the Trump administration will suspend Adobe and Microsoft from a program that allows its foreign workers to apply for green cards and become permanent residents, citing alleged fraud.

“There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft,” Vance said in a press conference on Oct. 8.

“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. If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants.”

Foreign worker visa programs were intended to supply high-level talent to fulfill demand where domestic supply was short, but companies are abusing the system to undercut American workers with lower-paid foreign employees, according to the vice president.

“There’s this pernicious idea that Americans are not good enough for the jobs in their own country,” Vance said. “This visa fraud is a frontal assault on the idea that you deserve to inherit the jobs and the positions in your own country.”

New actions taken by the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force place a freeze on the process for certain outsourcing and technology firms and an investigation into nine universities. Pitt, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Brown, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State, and MIT have been identified as abusing the J-1 visas used by foreign students for work- and study-based programs.

“This is a great day for American workers because we are taking some very concrete actions to cut down on some of the H-1B and J-1 visa fraud that we’ve been tracking over the past several months,” Vance said during the press conference.

The vice president acknowledged Department of Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, who oversaw investigations that uncovered $22 billion in fraud and secured more than 200 convictions over the past five months, calling the newly confirmed secretary “one of the all-stars on the anti-fraud task force.”

Speaking at the press conference, Sonderling said that other IT service companies would also be suspended from ​the Permanent Labor Certification Program, including Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini.

The companies collectively applied for approximately 3 million foreign-worker requests, resulting in more than 230,000 H-1B approvals and more than 100,000 certifications for permanent residency since 2009, according to Sonderling, who criticized the “hundreds of thousands of jobs that were taken from American workers.”

“These jobs that were stolen from them should have gone and will now go to Americans first, not foreigners and not foreign fraudsters,” he said.

Administration officials are deploying all tools at their disposal to mitigate the loss of opportunities for Americans in education and employment, according to the task force leaders.

Anthony D’Esposito, inspector general of the Department of Labor, announced that subpoenas were already served and that investigators are looking for more details of fraudulent activities, while also warning of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to influence U.S. education systems and the national security implications their actions entail.

“Nobody will be getting a free pass because their name is carved into an expensive building,” he said. “If an American university is breaking the law to save a dollar while exposing American research to a foreign adversary, that is not academic excellence; it’s institutional betrayal.”

Department of Labor Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito speaks during a White House Anti-Fraud Task Force press conference in the South Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington on Oct. 8, 2026. Travis Gillmore/The Epoch Times

Neither Adobe nor Microsoft responded to a request for comment by publication time.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is scheduled to meet with President Donald Trump later on Oct. 8 to receive a National Medal of Technology and Innovation.