The second Donald Trump administration endlessly argued against the H-1B work visa program, suggesting that it was responsible for American professionals’ unemployment. Often labelling its heavy use by US employers as “abuse,” Republicans completely flipped the way this particular channel of legal immigration to the US was viewed by the majority.
While the nonimmigrant visa category continues to be vilified, the focus has now shifted to another one that appears to have emerged as an alternative to H-1B.
With employment-based US visa applications being stuck in a miserable cycle of delays and cancellations, attention towards the so-called “Einstein Visa,” aka the EB-1A inevitably skyrocketed. Now, the surge in interest in this visa category has once again sparked fears of more fraud investigations, as per a CBS News report.
EB-1A applications on the rise, but approval rate not so much
As per the quarterly data publicly provided by USCIS, the number of EB-1A applications has tripled over the past four years. And so, nearly 7,500 applicants were reported for the April-June 2025 period, which marks a significant rise from about 2,500 in the last three months of 2021.
On the contrary, the ‘Einstein Visa’ approval rate has been on the decline since 2021. Official USCIS data indicated that 67% of the petitions were approved from April to June 2025. According to immigration analytics platform Lawfully, it signifies that the EB-1A approval rate has dropped to closer to 50% in recent months.
‘Einstein visa’ fraud? Officials speak out about fraudulent applications
According to an article CBS published a few days ago, two former US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agents familiar with the federal agency’s fraud investigations have brought the case of an increasing number of EB-1A “extraordinary ability” applicants applying for the visa with purchased or fraudulent credentials to light.
One of these officials who left USCIS last year told the US news outlet that people with money have found a way to buy their “evidence and fabricate” such things.
The USCIS has long maintained that such cases of fraudulent applications and misrepresentations could easily result in registrations being denied. On top of that, it could also bar the applicant from successfully reapplying for a US visa, as they’re red-flagged as inadmissible to the country.
As he has often reiterated in multiple USCIS press releases and social media warnings as well, USCIS spokesman Matthew Tragesser issued a statement to CBS News. It read: “USCIS is committed to rooting out fraud by thoroughly screening and vetting all aliens seeking immigration benefits. Anyone submitting fake evidence or misrepresenting themselves will be found out and face the consequences.”
As shared with the US outlet by some of these ex-agency officials, the USCIS may also be looking into some EB-1A applications it may have already approved to double-check for fraud. If misrepresentation can be proved, authorities may move forward with revoking a visa as well.
What has the EB-1A fraud entailed so far?
The EB-1A is a subcategory of the employment-based EB-1 visa. While this category is less backlogged, applicants must check-off at least three of 10 criteria detailed by the USCIS to be considered for the ‘Einstein Visa.’ This included winning awards, penning scholarly articles or even being a member of a professional association.
Last year, the Financial Express had already shed light on USCIS cracking down on certain EB-1A applicants, mostly Indian nationals. Our previous report cited allegations raised by Indian-origin US immigration attorney Rahul Reddy, who flagged cases wherein the “extraordinary ability” visa applicants had allegedly published in low-quality journals, generated fake citations and promoted questionable awards to add depth to the profiles.
And now, CBS News’ deep-dive into alleged fraud cases has laid bare countless posts and advertisements on SNS platforms like Telegram, Facebook and even WhatsApp groups. These purported posts have called on customers to pay so that their names can be listed as authors on scholarly papers they never actually contributed to.
Meta, which owns WhatsApp and Facebook, has since confirmed to the US outlet that some of these posts violated their policies. And so, they ban content involving fake documents and frauds, which enable “users to get visa approvals without fulfilling normal requirements.”
In one such alleged fraudulent development, CBS News exposed a visa “profile enhancement” Facebook page which lured software engineer Abhishek Bakare in May 2025, claiming that he would be listed as the fourth author on a computer science research paper in exchange for $500.
In a major plot twist, Bakare, in turn, told CBS that he lied about being interested in buying his way in so that he could gather information on the fraud. As per a phone conversation between Bakare and the seller, the person behind the page eventually told the engineer that he had 55 clients, and all of them were Indian nationals who were mostly pursuing EB-1A or other employment-based visas.
EB-1A visa fraud another menace in the making after ‘H-1B abuse’?
Towards the end of 2025, the Donald Trump administration ramped up its H-1B visa overhaul by introducing multiple policy changes to counter what the far-right and MAGA have long been calling “H-1B abuse.”
In September, the US Department of Labor’s Project Firewall launch was a sweeping blow that sought to sway employers away from “abusing H-1B visas at the expense of” American workers. In simple words, the Trump administration has vocally not been a fan of the ‘specialty occupations’ nonimmigrant visa category that has heavily attracted foreign talent for employment opportunities in the US.
Possibly the biggest blow for H-1B visa applicants, with India serving as their biggest source, came in December. Last month, the Department of Homeland Security formally changed its process for awarding the H-1B work visa by cutting off the lottery system. Through its wage-weighted selection process, the Trump government wanted to “prioritise the allocation of visas to higher-skilled and higher-paid aliens to better protect the wages, working conditions, and job opportunities for American workers.”
Bottom line, the Trump administration’s primary grudges against the H-1B visa program has been that it was “exploited” and “abused” by US employers looking to import foreign labour at lower wages instead of hiring American workers.