The Justice Department put out a press release on April 28, 2026, announcing that the Civil Rights Division filed a lawsuit against a Santa Clara, California-based tech company called Cloudera Inc., accusing it of violating the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) by purposefully discriminating against U.S. workers in favor of hiring individuals who have temporary visas.
The DOJ revealed that the complaint was filed with the Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer, which has jurisdiction over the case. “Employers cannot use the PERM sponsorship process as a backdoor for discriminating against U.S. workers,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said.
The Division will not hesitate to sue companies who intentionally deter U.S. workers from applying to American jobs,” Dhillon continued. The complaint alleges that Cloudera created a separate recruitment and hiring process in order to discourage U.S. workers from applying for jobs and refused to consider them for open, highly lucrative tech jobs that the company set aside for people with temporary employment visas.
“Cloudera created an email account that did not allow external emails, but still instructed applicants to use that unworkable email address to apply for jobs. The Division received a charge of employment discrimination from one U.S. worker who tried to apply using the email account Cloudera set up, but received a bounce back notification,” the press release said.
“When sponsoring current employees under the permanent labor certification program (PERM), Cloudera purposely failed to recruit U.S. workers in good faith,” the release continued. The PERM program enables employers to sponsor workers for permanent resident status after companies complete recruitment of U.S. workers. The program prohibits employers from discriminating against U.S. workers who apply for open positions based on their citizenship status.
“This lawsuit is part of the Department’s Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative, which was relaunched in 2025. The Initiative, under which the Division has already obtained ten settlements in the last year, focuses on companies that illegally discriminate against U.S. workers in favor of those with temporary employment visas,” the release explained.
People on X shared their thoughts on the DOJ’s announcement, with one individual saying, “This is encouraging, but the punishment has to be greater than the cost of doing business. A few million dollar slap on the wrist is a drop in the ocean compared to savings on foreign workers. They’ll just find more ways to keep hiring abroad.” Another wrote, “Why do you not have hundreds of these lawsuits? Literally almost every Indian run tech org is doing this. Is this just red meat to appease us to ignore how little is being done?”
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A third user pointed out that companies all over the country participate in this illegal practice. “Companies do this everywhere. Once an Indian gets into a management role, he/she will only hire other Indians. This happens at every major retailer too,” the user said. Someone else posted a comment in a similar vein saying, “Now do pretty much every company listed on the stock market.”