Cognizant’s Green-Card Filings Freeze After a U.S. Hiring Push

The U.S. Labor Department inspector general on September 8 suspended new PERM filings by Cognizant, the Teaneck, New Jersey IT company founded in Chennai in 1994. The freeze is the first step in employer-sponsored green cards, and it landed one day after Cognizant restated a U.S. campus hiring drive.

No criminal charges were announced. Cognizant’s H-1B program was not listed as shut in the first order, so the staffing engine that clients still buy can keep running while the path to permanent residency stops.

The Green-Card Door Closes While H-1B Stays Open

Anthony D’Esposito, the department’s inspector general, posted the action on X with Acting Secretary Keith Sonderling and the White House Fraud Task Force tagged in. He did not publish a case file, a count of frozen applications, or an end date.

Fighting fraud is a TEAM SPORT.@Sonderling47 and I are for real.@Cognizant’s PERM filings are suspended. @DOLOIG is on the hunt.

Threats to American workers will NOT be tolerated.

Alongside @WHFraudTF, we’re following facts, fraud and finances.

Handcuffs await.

— Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito (@USLaborIG) September 8, 2026

Fighting fraud is a TEAM SPORT. @Sonderling47 and I are for real. @Cognizant’s PERM filings are suspended. @DOLOIG is on the hunt. Threats to American workers will NOT be tolerated. Alongside @WHFraudTF, we’re following facts, fraud and finances. Handcuffs await.

Anthony D’Esposito, Inspector General, U.S. Department of Labor, on X

About an hour later he added Cloudera in a second post: “One more. @cloudera: PERM filings SUSPENDED.” That night, promoting a Dallas TV hit, he wrote “H1-B processing suspended.” His own earlier posts described a PERM action, and that is the lever the department has actually used.

PERM, the Program Electronic Review Management system, is how an employer asks Labor to certify that no qualified U.S. worker is available before it sponsors a foreign employee for a green card. H-1B is a separate, temporary visa. A PERM freeze can stall the American-residency path without pulling people off client sites the next morning.

Cognizant Pitched 1,500 U.S. Graduates on Monday

On September 7, Cognizant put out a Teaneck release on how it would hire 1,500 U.S. college graduates in 2026 and scale Frontier Certified Engineer and Frontier Business Operator roles to 15,000 people. The company named campus partners at the University of Georgia, Arizona State University, and the University of Kentucky, and it flagged its place as a national program sponsor of registered apprenticeships with the same Labor Department that froze its PERM desk a day later.

The 1,500 figure was not invented for that morning. Cognizant had already said in July it was on track to hire that U.S. class. The September 7 note wrapped the number into a larger American-workforce pitch, including a doubled Synapse skilling target of two million people by 2030 and a seat for CEO Ravi Kumar S on the RAISE US advisory board.

“We are hiring American graduates, standing up new American job categories for the AI era, and putting Cognizant’s capital and leadership behind a national coalition built to make sure this transition works for workers,” Kumar said in the release. Surya Gummadi, president of Cognizant’s Americas business, called the Frontier jobs “real, funded positions at Cognizant today.”

Those campus seats are not the population that PERM governs. The freeze lands on foreign staff already in the United States who need the company to open, or keep opening, green-card cases. U.S. graduates hired off the Georgia or Kentucky lists do not wait on Form ETA 9089.

Cloudera’s Clock Started in May

Pairing Cloudera with Cognizant made the September 8 posts look like a double raid. The California data software firm was already under a Labor Department 180-day freeze on Cloudera PERM applications, announced on May 12. From that date to September 9 is 120 days, which leaves about 60 days on the original clock unless the department extends it. The May release said an extension could follow a Justice Department investigation.

Justice had already sued Cloudera for excluding U.S. workers on April 28, filing with the Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Labor said Justice’s Civil Rights Division alleged Cloudera “engineered a non-functional recruitment process” that blocked qualified Americans from applying for high-paying technology jobs while the firm certified that no qualified U.S. workers were available.

“Protecting the integrity of our immigration and labor systems requires employers to follow the law and provide American workers a fair opportunity to compete for jobs,” Sonderling said in that May release. Cloudera is not an Indian body shop. It is a Santa Clara software company. The legal theory in its file is a rigged recruitment test, which is exactly the test PERM is supposed to run.

D’Esposito’s September 8 Cloudera post did not say whether he was restating the May freeze, extending it, or overlaying an inspector general action on top of Employment and Training Administration processing. He simply wrote that PERM filings were suspended, then moved on to television.

What a PERM Stop Does to a Worker

Labor’s own permanent labor certification process is an employer filing, not an employee filing. The worker cannot start it. If the employer is barred from new Form ETA 9089 cases, people who were next in the company’s green-card queue wait. A certified PERM is then valid for 180 days to travel with a Form I-140 immigrant petition to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Miss that window and the paper dies.

WHAT THE FREEZE CHANGES

• New PERM cases: Cognizant cannot start fresh labor certifications while the bar holds, so employees who have not been filed yet sit in place.
• Existing H-1B status: Temporary visas already approved were not described as cancelled, so people can keep working on the status they hold.
• Approved PERM paper: Prior certifications were not described as voided; the public order aimed at new filings.
• Criminal exposure: D’Esposito wrote that “handcuffs await,” but no charges against Cognizant or Cloudera were attached to the September 8 posts.

The people who feel that mix first are H-1B staff who have already built a U.S. life around a promised PERM start date. A campus hire in Arizona is not in that line. A senior engineer on a three-year H-1B who was told the company would file this fall is. The company can still staff a client with that engineer. It just cannot, for now, move that engineer toward a green card.

Cognizant’s Visa Paperwork Had Already Shrunk

USCIS figures circulating with the announcement put Cognizant’s H-1B petition approvals at 3,510 as of June 30, against 9,413 in 2020. Those two counts may not cover matching calendar spans, so they should be read as a drop, not as a precise rate. Labor Department disclosure data on Labor Condition Applications, the wage attestations that sit under H-1B filings, show a cleaner year-to-year slide.

COGNIZANT LCA FILINGS

Those rows are filings, not unique heads. Even so, Cognizant is a much smaller H-1B paper mill than it was in 2020. The September freeze is not a reaction to a new peak in visa volume. It is a reaction to how investigators say the remaining pipeline, and the PERM test attached to it, has been run.

Cognizant had not issued a public reply to the suspension as of September 9. Several requests for comment around the July probe also went unanswered.

The Bench Case That Predates This Probe

A separate civil jury in Los Angeles already found that Cognizant’s U.S. staffing habits cut against non-Indian workers. On October 4, 2024, jurors in Palmer v. Cognizant returned a verdict that the company engaged in a pattern or practice of intentional discrimination against non-South Asian employees on race and non-Indian employees on national origin, in terminations from “the bench,” the unpaid or underused pool between client assignments.

Judge Dolly M. Gee later found that “Visa Readiness,” “Visa Utilization,” and related practices had a disparate impact on non-South Asian and non-Indian employees, with a class period from December 15, 2016, to October 27, 2022. Plaintiffs said non-Indian staff were pulled off the bench and replaced with visa-ready workers from India. A Cognizant spokesperson said the company was disappointed, planned to appeal, and “does not tolerate discrimination.” In a later securities filing the company said it would keep fighting class certification and the 2024 trial.

That record is not a Labor Department fraud finding, and it does not prove the PERM allegations D’Esposito is chasing. It is the civil-rights backdrop that makes a PERM freeze land with extra force. PERM exists to test whether a U.S. worker can do the job. A jury has already said Cognizant’s bench rules treated some of those U.S. workers as disposable.

D’Esposito Left Other Sponsors Unnamed

The inspector general has been pointing at this industry since summer, in language built for television as much as for a docket.

THE ROAD TO THE FREEZE

1. April 28, 2026: Justice files an INA discrimination case against Cloudera over its PERM recruitment process.
2. May 12, 2026: Labor suspends processing of Cloudera PERM applications for 180 days, with room to extend.
3. July 8, 2026: The Office of Inspector General opens a nationwide H-1B and PERM investigation with Vice President J.D. Vance’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, citing fraudulent applications, wage-kickback schemes, benching, and below-wage labor, and asking whistleblowers to call 1-800-347-3756.
4. August 13, 2026: D’Esposito’s office describes Dallas field checks at a building tied to more than 500 approved H-1B petitions, with many offices locked and dark.
5. September 7, 2026: Cognizant restates the 1,500 U.S. graduate plan and the 15,000 Frontier-role target.
6. September 8, 2026: D’Esposito posts that Cognizant’s PERM filings are suspended, then Cloudera’s, then tells a Dallas audience that H-1B processing is suspended.

In July he told an interviewer that whistleblowers had been “talking about some of the biggest companies like Cognizant” in the “chatter” around PERM and H-1B. He issued “dozens of subpoenas.” He did not accuse the company of a crime then, and he still has not. When a user asked on September 8 whether the hunt stopped at Cognizant, he replied, “It’s not just…”

WHAT WE KNOW

• The order: New Cognizant PERM filings are suspended by the inspector general’s announcement, with Cloudera named in a follow-up post.
• The older case: Cloudera has been under a documented 180-day PERM processing freeze since May 12.
• The probe: The July 8 OIG inquiry is live, coordinated with the White House fraud task force, and still without a published charge sheet against Cognizant.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Duration: No public end date for the Cognizant bar, and no written extension notice for Cloudera beyond the original 180 days.
• H-1B processing: The inspector general’s night post used that phrase; his daytime posts, and the department’s prior Cloudera order, described PERM.
• The next name: TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and HCL sit in the same visa programs, and the three-word reply left them in play without putting them on paper.

The political audience around those posts already wants the freeze copied onto every large Indian IT sponsor, because PERM can be shut from a government desk without waiting for a jury. That is the cheap lever. It leaves client work staffed and puts the delay on workers whose green-card clocks are owned by their employer. D’Esposito can keep saying handcuffs await. As of September 9, the only hard paper on Cognizant is a stop on new labor certifications, and the company that spent September 7 selling American campus hires has not answered it.