Michelle Hackman

In Minneapolis, what really made that operation so remarkable, and it's still ongoing, is that you have a relatively small city of about 400,000 people and 3,000 ICE officers there.

A lot of these visas actually go to companies.

There's sort of a whole business model that's sprung up around the H-1B visa of sort of IT companies who staff almost their entire companies with primarily Indian men on H-1B visas.

And their model is that they do IT a little bit cheaper than a lot of companies' in-house IT offices.

And so what's happened over the last 20 or 30 years is that a lot of companies have actually laid off their internal IT and hired these sort of IT external companies on H-1B visas to come work for them instead.

When Trump takes office, he obviously has all of this anti-immigrant rhetoric.

You know, Mexicans are rapists and refugees are all terrorists.

And his movement, you know, sort of involved a lot of, you know, we want to hire more Americans.

We don't want jobs to go to foreigners.

And so naturally, the H-1B visa became sort of a target in that broader rhetoric.

But during the first Trump administration, you had a lot of competing voices.

You know, Jared Kushner was in the White House, and he was sort of a more old-school Republican, pro-business voice.

He was a bigger fan of the H-1B visa program.

And so the story of the first Trump administration was you definitely had the MAGA right, hates the H-1B.

A lot of other big business owners, including, you know, big tech, love the H-1B.

And so you see this sort of like policy tug of war taking place where overall, like nothing really happens.

You know, maybe denials for the visa go up a little bit, but for most of the Trump administration, it's not like they made major changes to the program.

You saw sort of a marginal around the edges, Trump and Biden both trying to tweak policies, you know, to make it so that people who are paid better are getting H-1B visas as opposed to people who are being paid lower than Americans, for example.

But I wouldn't say anything like particularly ideological happened with the H-1B under Biden.

But while Trump was out of office,