DHS Wants to End the 60-Day Grace Period for Laid-Off H-1B Workers. Lose Your Job, Leave the Next Day.

The Department of Homeland Security on Friday proposed eliminating the 60-day grace period that lets H-1B and other skilled foreign workers stay in the United States to find a new sponsor after losing a job. If the rule is finalized as written, a laid-off worker, along with a spouse and children, would be considered out of status the day after employment ends and expected to depart immediately unless separately authorized to remain.

The grace period was created by DHS in 2016 and took effect on January 17, 2017, three days before President Trump's first inauguration. Before that, no such cushion existed. Under the proposal from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, it would disappear not only for H-1B holders but for H-1B1 workers from Chile and Singapore, E-1 treaty traders, E-2 treaty investors, E-3 Australian specialists, L-1 intracompany executives and managers, O-1 visa holders of "extraordinary ability" and TN professionals from Canada and Mexico.

The agency's stated rationale is that ending the grace period "restores a direct relationship between an alien's nonimmigrant status and the specific employment or activity that formed the basis of his or her admission." DHS also argued the change would cut administrative work, saying that deciding whether a grace period applies "may be time consuming and complex for the agency" and confusing for petitioners and their dependents. In its cost-benefit discussion the department concluded that "the harm of the up to 60-day discretionary grace period outweighs the potential benefit."

By DHS's own figures, nearly 4,000 workers a year use the grace period, more than 99 percent of them on H-1B visas, and the agency reviewed 1.9 million petitions and applications requiring grace-period assessments between October 1, 2017 and May 20, 2026. Roughly 730,000 H-1B holders live in the country, with about 550,000 spouses and children, according to data cited by Time from the advocacy group FWD.us. The bulk are Indian nationals, with Chinese citizens a distant second. The annual cap remains 65,000 visas plus 20,000 for holders of advanced U.S. degrees.

DHS acknowledged the rule would affect prospective employers as well as families who could face removal, but assumed that "almost all" affected employers would "offer the same jobs to equally qualified U.S. workers, go through the I-129 petition process to sponsor nonimmigrant workers, or reassign the work to other current employees," conceding only that some might see temporary productivity losses.

The proposal is the latest in a string of moves against the program. The administration replaced the H-1B lottery with a weighted system favoring higher-paid workers, expanded a $4,000 biometric and security fee to extension applications from employers with large foreign workforces, and in August floated a $103,265 fee for certain petitions after a federal judge in June struck down its earlier $100,000 fee as an unconstitutional tax. Fox News Digital sought comment from DHS and the White House.

Nothing changes yet. The rule opened for public comment on September 11 and will not take effect until DHS reviews the feedback and publishes a final regulation, a process that typically takes months. Immigration lawyers expect a heavy volume of objections from the technology industry, which relies on H-1B workers through waves of layoffs and whose most prominent executives, including Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Google's Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, once held the visa themselves.