Congress

Trump’s visa fee sparks rare bipartisan interest in immigration legislation

Published

9 months ago

October 14, 2025

President Donald Trump’s efforts to impose a massive new fee for employers seeking to hire foreign workers in high-skill fields have reenergized congressional Republicans’ efforts to pass legislation strengthening the controversial visa program.

After years of dissipating interest inside the GOP to tackle any immigration policy not directly tied to border security, the current moment appears ripe for a legislative breakthrough around expanding the use of so-called H-1B visas, which have propelled the country’s tech industry for decades.

Opponents say the 35-year-old program siphons jobs from American citizens and unfairly deflates wages. But it also has united an unlikely group of lawmakers across the ideological spectrum who want to help businesses in need of workers with specialized expertise. That contingent includes Republicans who have typically been reluctant to support legislation that would allow more immigrants into the country.

The recent presidential proclamation forcing employers to pay $100,000 to hire workers under H-1B visas — a move designed to incentivize domestic hiring practices — is instilling fear and confusion inside hospitals and universities that rely on the program. It also has sent a jolt through the Senate, where the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee recently reintroduced legislation designed to strengthen the rules for the program and prioritize applicants with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering or mathematics.

“We need an immigration bill, badly,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), a cosponsor of the bill who is working to get fellow conservatives on board with the effort. He’s also running for governor of a state with multiple major research universities.

“I think Trump, perhaps inadvertently, is strengthening our case for the bill,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), another co-sponsor of the legislation.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, however, are skeptical there is sufficient political will to make any meaningful progress on the issue. Immigration hard-liners still occupy senior positions throughout the White House and hold power on Capitol Hill; Trump has waffled on the question of whether the H-1B policy is worth preserving; and at least one key Democrat says any conservative enthusiasm now to tackle the program is too little, too late.

“There’s no appetite for immigration legislation at all,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He is set to retire in 2027 with little to show for his work over nearly three decades in office to pass legislation that would create a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants.

The American economy relies heavily on H-1B visas, with the number of people applying for slots vastly outnumbering those which are available each year. And this is not the first time lawmakers have seen a glimmer of hope around efforts to overhaul the program — only to later see it fade.

Almost a year ago, the billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk was touting high-skilled immigration throughout the United States through H-1B visas, saying they were necessary to help fuel innovation. Trump, who suspended the program during his first term, suddenly appeared ready to side with Musk, lauding the initiative that he claimed to have leveraged for his own business interests.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a MAGA stalwart and Musk acolyte, also signaled an openness to revisiting the H-1B system from his perch as chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

But Musk has since that time had a public falling-out with the president, and anti-immigration hawks like White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller have Trump’s ear. Trump’s new H-1B visa fee is a reflection of the administration’s current stance.

“Anything that’s going to get done, the president’s got to sign off on it,” said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), “So it’s going to be something that the president feels comfortable with.”

Scott worked on a previous effort to limit the number of H-1B recipients who can receive green cards annually. Different versions of that bill passed the House and the Senate in 2019 and 2020, respectively, but the two measures were never reconciled, and the legislation was never signed into law.

Wishing to seize the moment but also cognizant of the political challenges ahead, Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) in an interview shifted his comments to deliver a personal plea to Trump himself.

“The president has brought attention to the problems with H-1B’s,” the Iowa Republican said. “If the president will read your story, I’d give him this message: He’s created great credibility because he has closed down the border — great credibility on immigration issues.”

Endorsing an H-1B overhaul bill, Grassley continued, “would give him a chance to get some of these really simple things in immigration that ought to pass the Congress.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on its intentions to work with Congress on a legislative fix.

George Fishman, a senior legal fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and former Department of Homeland Security official in the first Trump administration, said Trump is being pulled in radically different directions by those advising him. Barring true interest from Trump in the matter, Fishman suspected congressional action is unlikely.

“Based on three decades of bitter experience, I’m sort of resigned to not expecting things to happen legislatively,” said Fishman, who also worked on immigration policy as a Hill aide.

Trump aside, the political dynamics around the immigration issue on Capitol Hill are broadly problematic. For years, efforts to update the nation’s outdated immigration policy have fallen short. A bipartisan Senate “gang” in 2013 managed to pass a bill that combined border security with a pathway to citizenship, but it was never taken up in the House.

Since that time, the Trump ethos around immigration has further polarized the issue, hardening even Republicans who at one point linked their personal brands to being willing to work with Democrats on it.

That includes Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who was once Durbin’s main partner in trying to pass legislation that would protect young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents as children — the recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.

Graham now says he isn’t interested in doing anything to expand legal immigration until the border is properly secured — and he doesn’t trust Democrats to restrain themselves.

“We all are agreed that we need H-1B reform,” Graham said in an interview. “Well, then Democrats will say, ‘Okay, let’s reform that, but what about the DACA folks?’ And they’ll want something there, and that’s just the way it goes.”

Grassley said he understood that reality. “We got some people on the right that think they aren’t going to vote for any [immigration] legislation until you load up 12 million people and get them out of the country.”

In the meantime, Trump’s new $100,000 fee is being challenged in court by a coalition of unions, education groups and others who argue the cost is unworkable and unjustified. A judge could strike down the proclamation, and the case is ongoing.

Until then, Grassley suggested the chaos and anxiety being caused by the presidential action could work to the advantage of the program’s proponents.

“The business groups that fought the Grassley-Durbin bill over the last 10 years, that are now upset with the $100,000 the president’s putting in on each one of these [visas] … maybe they would realize that they shouldn’t have fought our legislation,” he said.

Congress

Senate Ethics dismisses allegations against Ruben Gallego

Published

2 hours ago

June 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The Senate Ethics Committee has dismissed allegations of misconduct levied against Sen. Ruben Gallego, who stood accused by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of “campaign finance violations and inappropriate conduct of a sexual nature.”

The charges came following the resignation of the Arizona Democrat’s longtime friend, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who was forced to step down amid accusations of serious sexual misconduct. Luna, a Florida Republican, sought to implicate Gallego by claiming in an interview on CBS that a woman would come forward about an “incident that occurred between the two of them at the same time and the event was sexual in nature allegedly.”

But in a letter to Gallego sent Monday — which he shared in a public news release — the notoriously inactive Ethics Committee cited Gallego’s “prompt contact with the Committee following media reports of the allegations and appreciated your full cooperation with the Committee throughout the investigation.”

Gallego has maintained he was unaware of the allegations against Swalwell and said in a statement he was a victim of “right-wing conspiracies peddled by far-right activists like Anna Paulina Luna, the White House, and their allies.”

He continued, “I look forward to an apology from Rep. Luna for weaponizing the ethics process while refusing to investigate historic corruption that’s making life harder for families.”

Luna, in a post on X, defended her referral to the Senate Ethics Committee.

“The good news about DC is everyone talks, and eventually the reporters come forward with your texts,” Luna wrote on social media. “Do yourself a favor and keep raising for your legal defense fund. Once a creep always a creep, and you’re gonna need it.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misstated Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s state. She represents Florida.

Congress

Rubio, Witkoff to brief Congress on Iran

Published

6 hours ago

June 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Top deputies of President Donald Trump will brief Congress on the Iran peace talks in a Monday conference call — the first time administration officials have addressed a broad group of lawmakers since Trump signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Tehran earlier this month.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, will lead the briefing for all House and Senate members at 4 p.m., according to seven people granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting.

Republicans and Democrats have called for more transparency about the 14-point agreement inked on June 18, which initiated a cease-fire between the two countries. Since then, the U.S. and Iran have continued to engage in hostilities.

Congress

Capitol agenda: Red, white and GOP hard-liner blues

Published

8 hours ago

June 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House Republicans finally cleared a runway this week to finish some of their top legislative priorities before the July 4 recess.

That is, unless a small band of hard-liners trip up those plans at takeoff.

Speaker Mike Johnson is hoping to move quickly to pass fiscal 2027 appropriations legislation, the annual defense policy bill and a kids online safety bill that has been years in the making. The movement comes after President Donald Trump instructed GOP hard-liners to stop holding up a procedural vote amid a protest from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna and others that the Senate hadn’t passed Trump’s election security bill.

But Luna and other hard-liners are still threatening to tank the procedural vote that could delay the defense policy bill and other measures until they get concessions on the SAVE America Act, amid other demands.

Johnson, for example, had also promised hard-liners a vote before July 4 on a sweeping GOP immigration bill introduced in the prior Congress as H.R. 2, which is highly unlikely to happen.

Johnson for his part has said the House will “pass the SAVE America Act again” by folding parts of it into a third party-line reconciliation bill. But the slimmed-down version he’d need to pursue in order to meet strict Senate rules for the budget process is already being panned by hard-liners as insufficient.

That reconciliation bill is also already delayed. House Republicans aren’t on track to meet their goal of advancing its framework before the July 4 recess as members on the Budget panel balked over how to pay for the legislation in a closed-door meeting last week.

“Time is of the essence, given how many legislative days we have,” House Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie, who is sponsoring the kids online safety legislation, said in an interview last week. “If we lose a week, that would be important.”

Meanwhile, Democratic leadership is grappling with their own heated internal divisions this week. Members are split over supporting the adoption of an amendment to a fiscal 2027 spending bill from Rep. Thomas Massie that would end Israel aid and cut the overall foreign military aid program by $3.3 billion.

Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro did not instruct her colleagues on how to vote during a rare Sunday evening caucus call, two sources granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting tell Mia and Riley. Leaders did, however, criticize the amendment as poorly written.

One other item this week that could split members of each party: House lawmakers are also slated to vote on a rewritten war powers resolution from Rep. Rashida Tlaib to reign in Trump administration military actions in Lebanon. Leadership worked with Tlaib to come up with new language last month that is expected to garner more Dem support, but the resolution is still expected to fail without GOP votes.

What else we’re watching:

— SENATE GOP GETS ANTSY ABOUT NOMINATIONS: Some Republican senators are unsettled by Trump’s apparent lack of urgency in filling vacant posts, even as GOP control of the chamber beyond the midterms is increasingly in doubt. There are more than two dozen federal court vacancies. Labor secretary, FDA commissioner and scores of other open positions do not have nominees, and a senior White House official said Trump is in no rush to fill them. “We’re running short on time,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a member of Senate HELP, which oversees health, labor and other issues.

—RICK SCOTT SAYS HE’S JUST TRYING TO HELP: Fresh off his controversial Trump invite to a Senate GOP lunch last week, Sen. Rick Scott told Blue Light News in an interview he’s trying to make a mark — not trying to challenge Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Scott insists that neither his invitation to the president nor a letter he circulated afterward outlining how the Senate GOP should be preparing for the midterms should be seen as a prelude to a leadership challenge. The Florida Republican said he’s perfectly happy running the conference’s conservative Steering Committee and predicted Thune would easily secure another term as leader. What has become eminently clear in recent weeks is that Scott — after a long career in business, two terms as governor and nearly eight years as senator — just isn’t a back-bench kind of guy.

Meredith Lee Hill, Riley Rogerson, Alex Gangitano, Jordain Carney and Cheyenne Haslett contributed to this report.