Trump DOJ Civil Rights Chief Says Tech Companies Cannot Bypass American Workers for H-1B Hires

Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice, posted on X Thursday night that companies discriminating against American workers in favor of foreign labor are breaking the law.

"This administration will not allow American employers to discriminate against American workers," Dhillon wrote, according to Breitbart. "It is illegal, wrong, and bad for our economy."

Dhillon's post argued that federal and most state employment laws require a level playing field for American workers against foreign labor. She said many tech companies prefer hiring what she called "cheaper/exploitable foreign workers" for jobs Americans could fill, and do so by not posting those jobs through normal recruiting channels open to U.S. citizens.

The Fight That Triggered It

Dhillon's statement landed in the middle of an already heated argument inside Silicon Valley over the H-1B visa program, which allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations. According to Breitbart, roughly 2 million people currently hold H-1B, L-1, J-1, O-1, H-4EAD, TN, OPT, or CPT work permits in the United States, and the H-1B program alone keeps close to 1 million migrants and their spouses in the country tied to U.S. jobs.

The spark was a comment from Ankit Gupta, a partner at startup accelerator Y Combinator, who described most of the country as "flyover country" while criticizing calls to restrict H-1B hiring. Gupta had also mocked a widely shared post from Vice President JD Vance, who argued the H-1B program lets companies sideline or replace American graduates. Gupta called Vance's position "DEI for Americans" and said it represented "a win for the woke left."

Gupta's comments drew national attention and criticism, including from Federal Trade Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, according to Breitbart's reporting.

Y Combinator's current CEO, Garry Tan, publicly rebuked his own deputy over the remarks. Tan, a Canadian immigrant who took over Y Combinator from founder Paul Graham in 2025 and describes himself as a political moderate, said his firm supports hiring and funding "Americans, whom he defined as Americans born in American or naturalized," according to Breitbart's characterization of Tan's statement. That definition would exclude the millions of workers currently in the U.S. on the visa categories Breitbart listed.

Musk and Graham on the Other Side

Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa and became a U.S. citizen, has been one of the most vocal defenders of the H-1B program. Breitbart cited a December 2024 post in which Musk wrote that he and "so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong" are in the U.S. because of H-1B visas, adding he would "go to war" over the issue.

Paul Graham has also aligned with investors who argue companies should be free to hire whoever they judge most qualified, regardless of nationality, even when that means passing over American applicants.

Dhillon's post effectively sides with Vance against Musk, Graham, and other investors who favor unrestricted hiring across borders, placing a sitting DOJ official squarely inside an intra-industry fight that has been playing out publicly on social media.

What's Actually at Stake Legally

Dhillon did not announce a new investigation, lawsuit, or enforcement action in her post. She stated a legal position: that failing to post jobs through normal channels in order to favor foreign hires over qualified Americans is unlawful discrimination under existing federal and state employment law. No specific company was named, and no charges have been filed against any employer as of this writing.

The tech industry's position, as voiced by Musk and Graham's camp, holds that specialized technical roles sometimes require skills genuinely scarce in the domestic labor pool. Companies like SpaceX and Tesla trace direct lineage to immigrant founders and early technical staff who arrived on visas like H-1B. Restricting that pipeline, in their view, risks pushing innovation and company formation to countries with looser immigration rules for skilled workers.

Dhillon's and Vance's position is that the scale of the visa programs—nearly 2 million workers across the categories Breitbart cited—goes well beyond a narrow shortage-filling function. Bypassing normal U.S. hiring channels to reach that scale is itself the alleged violation, regardless of whether any individual hire was skilled.

Whether Dhillon's Civil Rights Division moves from a social media statement to an actual enforcement action against a named employer is the open question. No such action has been announced.