America’s biggest tech firms are scrambling to get foreign workers into the country ahead of a midnight deadline to avoid a new $100,000 visa fee announced by President Trump. Thousands of workers already in the country are being advised not to travel abroad until further notice.

An unidentified administration official sought to calm the panic Saturday, telling Politico that the new fee would not be applied to current visa-holders returning from overseas travel. But concerns remained in the absence of any official announcement.

Mr. Trump signed an executive order on Friday establishing the annual fee for foreign workers entering the country on H-1B visas, which go overwhelmingly to skilled employees at major tech firms including Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

In a fact sheet accompanying the order, the White House said American workers “are being replaced with lower-paid foreign labor, creating an economic and national security threat to the nation.”

The U.S. commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, said during the Oval Office announcement of the new visa regime that American employers need to decide “is the person valuable enough to have a $100,000-a-year payment to the government, or they should head home, and they should go hire an American.”

“All of the big companies are on board,” he added, saying, “We’ve spoken to them.”

Nevertheless, several major employers of H-1B visa holders appeared not to have been prepared for the rapid implementation of the new policy, which comes with less than 48 hours’ public notice.

 Amazon, the nation’s largest sponsor of the visa holders with more than 10,000 visas issued so far this year, sent a stark warning to its foreign employees on an internal guidance messaging service shortly before midnight Friday, according to Business Insider.

“If you have H-1B status and are in the US: Stay in the country for now, even if you have travel planned for the immediate future,” the message said. “If you have H-1B or H-4 status and are outside the US: Try to return before tomorrow’s deadline if possible.”

The New York-based newspaper said similar guidance had been issued to visa holders at Microsoft, Meta, and JPMorgan Chase, according to employees at the firms.

“We know this may interrupt your travel plans,” said an internal message shared with Business Insider by five Microsoft employees. “But the critical thing is to stay in the US in order to avoid being denied reentry.”

The unidentified U.S. official told Politico that current H-1B visa holders “do not need to be rushing back before Sunday.” But a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, said employers will need a more public clarification from the Department of Homeland Security.

“It’s quite possible that DHS may release guidance saying that it does not apply to everyone, despite what it says,” Mr. Reichlin-Melnick wrote in a post on X. “But right now there is nothing official from the U.S. government saying so. They need to get it out TODAY if they want to ‘tamp down panic.’”

The new regime, which would require employers to pay the $100,000 fee every year that an H-1B visa holder remains in the country, could quickly become expensive for the largest tech companies, which bring in thousands of highly trained workers on the visas, mostly from India.

For Amazon, which has sponsored more than 10,000 of the visas this year according to Customs and Immigration data, the bill would exceed $1 billion annually if it were to continue employing foreign workers at that rate.

Other hard-hit companies would include Microsoft and Meta, each of which has employed more than 5,000 of the visa holders so far this year and would face bills of more than $500 million. Apple and Google are close behind, each having hired more than 4,000 visa holders this year.

Mr. Lutnick argued that the solution is not for the companies to dig deeper into their pockets but to hire more American workers.

“If you’re going to train somebody, you’re going to train one of the recent graduates from one of the great universities across our land,” he said Friday. “Train Americans. Stop bringing in people to take our jobs.”

The White House factsheet said the share of IT workers with H-1B visas has doubled since 2003 and now stands at more than 65 percent. Meanwhile the unemployment rate for recent computer science graduates in America has reached 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent for computer engineering graduates. It says that is more than twice the rates for biology or art history majors.

“American companies are laying off their American technology workers and seemingly replacing them with H-1B workers,” the factsheet says. “One company was approved for 5,189 H-1B workers in FY 2025, while laying off roughly 16,000 U.S. employees this year.”

Some independent analysts, however, warn that the new policy could prompt companies to move more work overseas and undermine America’s position in the race with China for AI dominance.

“In the short term, Washington may collect a windfall; in the long term, the U.S. risks taxing away its innovation edge, trading dynamism for short-sighted protectionism,” eMarketer analyst Jeremy Goldman told Reuters.