🍁 Happy Friday! Today's newsletter is 971 words, a 4-min read.

🗓️ Programming Note: Big news drop coming in next week’s edition. Stay tuned (Hint: it’s immigration case processing data 🤫).

👉 Last thing: There’s always plenty to cover in this newsletter each week, but I want to hear from our growing newsletter community—what do you want me to cover in future weeks?

Thanks for being here—and email me your suggestions at [email protected].

1 big thing: Reading between the lines on the Republican schism over H-1Bs

What a week of wildly misinformed rhetoric on the H-1B program!

Jokes aside, H-1Bs have never had this much airtime from the White House, Congress, and media personalities all at once.

It started with President Trump himself, who in a Wednesday interview rebuked Fox News host Laura Ingraham for questioning the need for the H-1B program.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent backed him up, as did DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and DOL Secretary Chavez-DeRemer—but each with a heavy pinch of enforcement rhetoric.

Then came the schism: We’ve covered the escalating Republican attacks on H-1Bs in this newsletter before…

…and it’s worth noting that the August and September rhetoric culminated in the $100k H-1B fee proclamation and Project Firewall…

…but this week, the rhetoric went nuclear. Here’s just a very small sample.

And then there’s who’s been quiet: Stephen Miller and Joseph Edlow…crickets.

No surprise there—they’re actively working on H-1B reform and—unlike almost everyone talking about it this week—they actually know what they’re doing.

Why it matters: Is Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bill going to end the H-1B program? No.

But key Republicans in Congress are actively looking for ways to constrain H-1Bs.

As a very smart former Dept. of Labor exec pointed out to me this week, one serious path is the appropriations process.

The Dept. of Labor launched Project Firewall (more on that below) to massively scale investigations into H-1B fraud and abuse—but they need more money and staff to actually do it. Congress could give it to them.

My takeaway: If you’re a practitioner, do not dismiss any of this rhetoric.

The anti-H-1B energy—and the money behind it—is very real.

That doesn’t mean it should cause panic either. Your clients or company don’t need to quit and shut down their H-1B sponsorship.

But vigilance, compliance, and data-driven strategy can’t just be conference buzzwords anymore—they need to take up real space on your weekly calendar.

Meanwhile: H-1B processing itself has remained normal so far, even as USCIS is starting to field the surge of cases post-shutdown.

We’ll keep tracking that trend in real-time here at Lawfully.

Want a deeper, inside look into that data and more? Email me at [email protected] and we’ll get you access to Lawfully Intelligence so you can see our full USCIS case processing dataset in real-time.

🎙️ On the pod: Poonam Gupta—Founder and Principal at Summit Legal—joined me on The Weekly Immigration News Recap to break down this week’s H-1B discourse and put it in context.

2. DOL shares data on the first investigations of Project Firewall

In a Nov 7 exclusive, Fox News reported that the Dept. of Labor has launched at least 175 ongoing investigations into potential H-1B abuses as part of Project Firewall.

As Fox writes, “The Department of Labor could not provide details on the specifics of the 175 current investigations, which account for over $15 million in calculated back wages to workers, but reported to Fox Digital that it has uncovered a bounty of concerns.”

These include:

• Foreign workers with advanced degrees being paid far below advertised wages, depressing wages for both H-1B and U.S. workers.

• Employers failing to notify USCIS when H-1B workers were terminated, or waiting far too long to report the termination.

• Employers failing to properly notify U.S. workers, accurately describe jobs, and list correct wages.

• LCAs with nonexistent worksites, workers unaware of the jobs they were supposedly assigned, employees paid less than what the LCA promised, and copy-pasted job notices that didn’t match the actual role.

• “Benching,” or H-1B workers left unpaid between projects.

For what it’s worth: the former Dept. of Labor exec I spoke with this week viewed these numbers and the spotlighted investigations as routine—essentially the normal volume of H-1B investigations the Department tends to have open at any given time.

So it’s very possible no major new resources have been deployed to Project Firewall yet, and the Dept. of Labor is simply publicizing the numbers for political effect (wild thought, I know).

A big shoutout: Kevin J. Andrews—Founder and Principal Attorney at his own immigration practice—first flagged this article to me.

If you’re an immigration practitioner, I highly recommend you go read Kevin’s piece: Project Firewall: 6 Red Flags You Need to Know.

It’s one of the most thoughtful and strategic analyses I’ve seen on Project Firewall.

Kevin will (hopefully) be on the pod soon, and we’ll dig into Project Firewall—and the data behind it—in much more detail. Stay tuned.

3. L-1 processing times are increasing, despite steady demand

📈 New Data: Another small sneak peek from Lawfully Intelligence. L-1 processing times at USCIS—across L-1A and L-1B—have been rising steadily since Oct 2024.

Last October, regular processing averaged just over 2 months. This October, the average hit 5.5 months, according to the latest data from Lawfully.

Why it matters: With new barriers to the H-1B program—and likely more coming—I’ve heard many practitioners point to the L as a smart alternative for many programs.

I won’t comment on that, but it’s worth spotlighting that L processing times have already increased across two administrations, and without any meaningful rise in demand for the L-1 visa—which we know from the latest USCIS data through Jun 2025.

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📩 That’s it for this week! I want to hear your feedback and questions, so drop me a note anytime at [email protected].

See you next week!