In November of 2018, Usha and her husband Sudhir received the news they never expected: the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services declined to extend Usha’s work visa, meaning the couple and their daughter would have 180 days to leave the country before the US government would consider their presence to be unlawful.

The notice hit the whole family like a punch to the gut. Eight years before, Usha and her daughter had moved from India to New Jersey to join Sudhir, who was already living in the United States, pursuing a master’s degree in computer science. Both Usha and Sudhir landed jobs as quality assurance analysts for IT outsourcing firms, relying on so-called H-1B visas, which are reserved for specialty occupations. Before coming to the US, Usha had earned a bachelor's in math and physics, and a master's in political science. They’d bought a home, paid their taxes, and enrolled their daughter, who’s now 16, in school. Usha had been approved in the early stages of the green card process, and had successfully extended her H-1B visa twice before.

Nothing had changed about her job, her skillset, or her educational background since the family started their lives in the United States. And yet, when she tried to renew her visa a third time last year, the government denied her, arguing that her job was not considered a specialty after all. “I’m not doing anything different now,” says Usha, who agreed to speak on the condition that WIRED wouldn’t publish her last name. “What makes them say today that I do not have a specialty?”

Usha is one of thousands of current US tech workers who have had their visas suddenly rejected thanks to new policies implemented by President Trump’s administration. Since 1990, the H-1B program has enabled US companies to employ foreign workers on a temporary basis for jobs that “require the theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge.” These visas are reserved for people with at least a bachelor’s degree in their specialty, or some form of equivalent training, and they’re intended as a backstop for employers who can’t find Americans to fill the position. The government issues just 65,000 of these visas per year, with another 20,000 set aside for people who have gotten a master’s degree or higher in the US. Due to the high demand for tech skills, H-1B visas have always been both coveted and competitive. In 2018 alone, companies filed 419,000 petitions for both new and continuing visas. But over the last two years, new research finds, denial rates across both categories have spiked dramatically.

Issie Lapowsky covers the intersection of tech, politics, and national affairs for WIRED.

According to a recent analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonprofit that studies immigration, the denial rate for applicants like Usha who are trying to extend their visas grew from 4 percent in 2016 to 12 percent in 2018; the rate climbed even higher, to 18 percent, through the first quarter of 2019. When it comes to new employment, meanwhile, USCIS has more than doubled the share of petitions it turns down, from 10 percent in 2016 to 24 percent in 2018. In the first quarter of 2019, the denial rate was 32 percent. This is despite a steady decrease in the total number of new applications under President Trump.

"I think the most striking thing is the change in denial rates has happened without any new law or regulation that many people feel would be necessary to have allowed an agency to deny so many applications in a legal manner," says Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy and a former staffer on the Senate Immigration Subcommittee.

Instead, the Trump administration has enacted these changes solely through executive power. While campaigning to become president, Donald Trump promised to overhaul the H-1B visa program, which he argued made it too easy for businesses (including his own) to hire foreign workers and pay them less money than American ones. During his first months in office, President Trump signed the so-called “Buy American, Hire American” executive order, which sought to prioritize visas for the “most-skilled or highest-paid” workers.