The Trump Department of Justice has filed a federal lawsuit against Cloudera Inc., a major Silicon Valley tech company, for deliberately discriminating against qualified American workers in favor of foreign visa holders for high-paying tech positions.
The Civil Rights Division’s lawsuit accuses Cloudera of violating the Immigration and Nationality Act by creating a sham, separate hiring process designed to deter and exclude American citizens while fast-tracking foreign workers on temporary visas.
“Employers cannot use the PERM sponsorship process as a backdoor for discriminating against U.S. workers,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said. “The Division will not hesitate to sue companies who intentionally deter U.S. workers from applying to American jobs.”
According to the DOJ, Cloudera set up a dedicated email address for job applications that was deliberately configured not to accept emails from outside the company.
American workers who followed the company’s posted instructions received automatic bounce-back messages stating that their applications could not be processed.
The DOJ said in a press release:
The complaint alleges Cloudera intentionally created a separate recruitment and hiring process to deter U.S. workers from applying, and also did not consider them, for lucrative technology jobs that the company earmarked for people with temporary employment visas. Cloudera created an email account that did not allow external emails, but still instructed applicants to use that unworkable email address to apply for jobs. The Division received a charge of employment discrimination from one U.S. worker who tried to apply using the email account Cloudera set up, but received a bounce back notification. When sponsoring current employees under the permanent labor certification program (PERM), Cloudera purposely failed to recruit U.S. workers in good faith.
At the same time, Cloudera was actively sponsoring foreign workers for permanent residency through the Department of Labor’s PERM program, a process that legally requires employers to make a genuine good-faith effort to recruit and hire qualified American workers first.
The complaint states:
America’s civil rights and labor laws are clear: if you want to sponsor people with temporary visas for permanent residency, you cannot discriminate against U.S. workers. In fact, employers must sign under penalty of perjury that the job opening “does not involve unlawful discrimination by race, creed, color, national origin, age, sex, religion, handicap, or citizenship.” 20 C.F.R. § 656.10(c)(5) (emphasis added). These protections are to ensure that U.S. workers are given a fair opportunity to compete for jobs because nonimmigrant visa programs have “been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.”
The DOJ is seeking a court order that would stop the illegal hiring practices, fine the company for each victim, require the company to pay lost wages to American workers who were shut out, and allow for any other corrective measures the judge finds appropriate.
This action is part of the Trump administration’s Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative, which targets companies that illegally favor temporary visa workers over American citizens. Since its relaunch, the initiative has already produced ten settlements.
In 2017, Cloudera was one of 97 major companies that filed an amicus brief in federal court opposing President Trump’s temporary travel ban on refugees and visa holders from certain countries.
As The Gateway Pundit reported at the time, Cloudera joined other Big Tech firms in claiming the policy harmed their business interests and ability to hire foreign talent.
It turns out, the company was rigging its own hiring system against American workers to benefit the very foreign visa programs it was fighting to protect.
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