The DOL launched Project Firewall in September 2025, activating enforcement authority the Secretary of Labor had never used and coordinating across four federal agencies. The investigations that followed are now maturing. For employers who have not yet assessed their exposure, the first wave of outcomes (debarments, penalty assessments, back wage orders) is the reason to act now.

The Wage and Hour Division is at the door. They have received a complaint alleging that H-1B workers on your payroll are working remotely from locations not listed on their Labor Condition Application. You are confident your program is clean, but are you confident enough to be audited?

When the Department of Labor (DOL) launched Project Firewall in September 2025, that scenario felt theoretical to most employers. It is less theoretical now. The investigations initiated under the Secretary certification mechanism take months to complete, and eight months later, enforcement outcomes are arriving: 175 investigations and $15 million in back wages assessed by November 2025 alone.

What Project Firewall is

Project Firewall is a DOL-led H-1B enforcement initiative focused on ensuring employers prioritize qualified U.S. workers and do not use foreign labor to undercut domestic wages. It did not create new law. It raised the consequences of being found in violation of it.

The structural change that matters most is Secretary-certified investigations. For the first time in DOL history, the Secretary of Labor will personally certify investigations where reasonable cause exists to believe an employer is out of compliance. That authority has sat in federal statute for over 30 years unused. It is being used now.

Project Firewall also formalizes coordination across the Wage and Hour Division, the Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), meaning an employer who shows up on one agency’s radar is more likely to appear on another’s.

A $100,000 Fee. Same Day.

Project Firewall launched the same day the Trump administration announced a $100,000 H-1B application fee for workers petitioned from abroad. The timing may or may not have been intentional, but the signal was clear: the cost and risk profile of the H-1B program changed overnight. The program is still available, but the assumptions employers have long relied on are no longer safe.

Where Employers are Exposed

The violations Project Firewall targets are not exotic. They are likely ordinary oversights or process gaps that have existed for years and are now being examined much more closely.

• Worksite accuracy. Assigning H-1B workers to client sites or locations not listed on the LCA is a direct violation, and this initiative is specifically built to find it. The same issue arises when employees work remotely from a location that was never added to their LCA.
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• Wage compliance. H-1B workers must be paid the higher of the prevailing wage or the actual wage paid to similarly qualified employees. Gaps between what is certified on the LCA and what workers are actually paid are a primary enforcement focus.
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• Recruiting language. “H-1B preferred” or “H-1B only” in a job posting can independently trigger DOJ citizenship-status enforcement and EEOC national-origin enforcement. A recent DOJ settlement resulted in a $200,000 civil penalty over exactly this conduct. Talent acquisition teams should also audit their job ad templates and vendor instructions.

• Benching. For staffing and consulting firms, any nonproductive time caused by the employment relationship, not a voluntary decision by the worker, must be paid. Audits under Project Firewall are specifically designed to surface these arrangements.
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•  U.S. worker displacement. For H-1B-dependent employers and those designated as willful violators, a review window runs 90 days before and after a petition filing. If your company falls into either category and reduced headcount in comparable roles anywhere near an H-1B petition, the documentation around that decision will matter.

Penalties scale with severity: per-violation civil money penalties in the low thousands for standard violations, tens of thousands for willful ones, with debarment from future H-1B filings extending up to five years for the most serious cases, and the Secretary certification mechanism means a competitor or advocacy group can put your company in the queue without a single employee filing a complaint.

Act Before You're Asked To

Run a current LCA audit. Every active H-1B employee’s certified worksite, wage, and job duties need to be checked against what is already happening. If something has changed without an amendment, fix it before it gets found.

Get your documentation in order. Certified LCAs, public access files, payroll records, and worksite posting proof should be organized and accessible. An investigator at the door is a bad time to discover gaps.

Build a real approval gate for location and worksite changes. Remote shifts, client-site reassignments, and duty changes that get informally approved by managers are among the most common sources of LCA inaccuracy. That workflow needs to be enforced and not just documented.

Audit your recruiting. Any posting or vendor instruction that references visa status as a preference needs to come down, and someone needs to understand how it got there.

The H-1B program runs on self-certification: employers attest to compliance before anyone checks. Project Firewall is the DOL’s announcement that checking is now part of the program, and the first round of checks is coming back. So back to the scenario at the top: the Wage and Hour Division is at the door. Whether you can answer that knock with confidence is something worth finding out today, not then.

About the Author

Ashlee Drake Berry is an employment-based immigration attorney and Head of Legal at Casium, a legal technology company focused on U.S. business immigration. She previously managed high-volume H-1B, PERM, and green card programs for a major technology company and has extensive experience advising startups, enterprise employers, and individual professionals on temporary visas and employment-based green card strategies. Ashlee writes regularly about the intersection of immigration policy, legal technology, and talent strategy, with a focus on practical playbooks employers can use to navigate fast-changing rules.