$3,800 Flights and Aborted Takeoffs: How Trump’s H-1B Announcement Panicked Tech Workers

After a six-week work trip, Xiayun, an employee at a semiconductor company in Silicon Valley, had landed at her hometown in China for vacation when she saw the news about H-1B visas. On Friday afternoon, US president Donald Trump signed a proclamation saying that any H-1B visa holder’s entry into the US will be “restricted, except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000.” The news left Xiayun and hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers scrambling to figure out how they’d be impacted and whether, if they were abroad, they should return before Sunday, when the new rule was set to take effect.

Xiayun, who asked to use her online alias and not mention her employer’s name in the story to avoid being identified, claims she started receiving communications from her manager asking her to consider returning as soon as possible to avoid being charged the fee. Before she even met her family at the airport, she says she already decided to fly back to the US as soon as possible. She only stayed in Urumqi for two hours before hopping on the next flight back to California.

“I had looked forward to the opportunity of traveling with my parents for a long time, but the reality is, I can’t leave behind my husband, my cat, my house, my friends, and my job in the US,” she tells WIRED.

H-1B is one of the most common work visas, issued to skilled workers seeking temporary residence in the US as long as three years, with the possibility of renewal providing continuing employment. In 2019, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) estimated that there were over 580,000 immigrants holding H-1B visas in the country. Silicon Valley companies are the program’s biggest users, according to data collected by USCIS on the employers who had the most H-1B visas approved every year. In fiscal year 2025, the top companies sponsoring new H-1B visas included Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and Google.

By Friday evening, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon had sent urgent communications to foreign employees, according to emails reviewed by WIRED, advising them to return to the states before the Sunday deadline set in the proclamation.

Conflicting messages poured out of the White House, US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and other government social media accounts. “Things are changing every hour, every 30 minutes,” says Steven Brown, an immigration attorney at Reddy Neumann Brown PC. Lutnick claimed the $100,000 fee would be charged annually, others said it’s a one-time charge; the original proclamation did not exempt current visa holders, but the follow-up announcements did. The contradictions and new developments left legal immigrant workers, their families, and employers unsure what to believe over the past weekend.

WIRED talked to six H-1B visa holders who made last-minute decisions to return to the US from vacation or work trips before the new policy took hold. All of them requested to be identified with only their first or last names in this story, fearing that speaking out against the administration will cause retribution. While explanations posted by the administration on Saturday afternoon clarified that most H-1B visa holders who were outside of the country at the time did not actually need to rush back, by then they claim they had already lost thousands of dollars in changing their travel plans and spent two days in emotional stress.