After President Trump issued the Buy American and Hire American executive order, where he promised reforms for the H-1B program, US citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) began issuing a record number of H-1B petition denials, despite no changes to US immigration law. The denial rate for first-time H-1B petitions increased from ten percent in 2016 to twenty-four percent in 2019. Figures show that a record number of those H-1B denials have been overturned on appeal, which suggests that USCIS officers may have wrongly rejected some H-1B petitions. “Previously, deniable cases were being denied and approvable cases were being approved,” William Stock of Klasko Immigration Law Partners said. “What we are seeing now is that approvable cases are being denied, so what the [appeals office] is saying is, ‘This is an approvable case, it shouldn’t have been denied.’”

Between the 2014 and 2017 fiscal years, the Administrative Appeals Office reversed about three percent of the H-1B decisions it reviewed. In 2018, however, it overruled USCIS in nearly fifteen percent of H-1B appeals and remanded more than seven percent of decisions, sending them back to be re-evaluated (compared with four percent in the previous four years). A federal immigration agency spokesperson noted that only one percent of all H-1B denials are appealed and that the figures are consistent “with a series of agency reforms designed to protect U.S. workers, cut down on frivolous petitions, strengthen the transparency of employment-based visa programs, and improve the integrity of the immigration petition process.” Steven Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration at Cornell University, says it’s not clear if the figures show a one-year flip or actual trend. He said: “It remains to be seen whether that continues or whether the [appeals office] also starts to toe the administration line and goes back up to the 90 percent level of agreeing with the initial denials.”