An enforcement tool that sat unused for at least four years — and possibly forever
In September 2020, the Department of Labor's Office of Inspector General released a review asking a simple question: when DOL finds that an H-1B employer broke the law, does anything happen to them? The answer, based on four years of data (FY2015-2018), was mostly no.
WHD completed 825 H-1B investigations. 649 of them — 78.7% — found at least one violation. Of those 649 cases with violations, only 38 resulted in debarment. That's 5.9%. Roughly 19 out of every 20 employers found to have violated H-1B rules faced no debarment at all.
The report identified why: WHD can only open an H-1B investigation under four legal scenarios — a complaint from an aggrieved party, a tip from a credible source, a Secretary-initiated random audit of a suspected willful violator, or a Secretary-certified investigation of any employer where reasonable cause exists. In practice, WHD had only ever used the first two. The Secretary's authority — options 3 and 4 — had never been exercised, not once, in the history of the program up to that point.
"According to WHD officials, the agency has never sought the Secretary's initiation of an investigation due to the limited information available prior to an investigation and the difficulty in establishing willfulness."
The report also explained why complaint-driven enforcement structurally misses most violations. About 95% of investigations came from "aggrieved party" complaints — and the vast majority of those came from former employees, not current ones. A current H-1B worker who complains risks their employer being debarred, which would force them to leave the country; many are also hoping that same employer will eventually sponsor their green card. The incentive structure all but guarantees silence from the workers most likely to know about violations in real time. Combined with a 12-month statute of limitations on complaints, the report concluded that DOL's enforcement model was structurally unlikely to catch most violators.
Project Firewall: the Secretary's authority, finally activated
On September 19, 2025, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer announced Project Firewall — a new H-1B enforcement initiative. Its centerpiece is the exact authority the 2020 report said had never been used.
"Secretary-certified investigations, as well as other H-1B-related investigations, are important tools the department will use in Project Firewall to hold employers accountable and protect the rights of American workers."
Multiple law firms covering the launch were explicit about what this meant in practice: for the first time, the Secretary of Labor can personally certify an investigation into an employer based on "reasonable cause" — without waiting for a worker complaint. This is precisely Recommendation 1 from the 2020 OIG report, which urged WHD to "utilize the Secretary options to initiate H-1B investigations, including identifying the criteria that would allow the Secretary to initiate an investigation."
Project Firewall directly addresses the structural problem the 2020 report identified: that enforcement depended almost entirely on former employees filing complaints within a 12-month window. By certifying investigations proactively — using data analytics on payroll and filing patterns rather than waiting for a complaint — DOL no longer needs an aggrieved worker willing to risk their immigration status to trigger a case.
The initiative also adds interagency coordination that didn't exist in the 2020 framework: DOL now shares information with USCIS, the DOJ Civil Rights Division, and the EEOC. The 2020 report made no mention of this kind of cross-agency data sharing as part of the investigation-triggering process.
What changed — and what we still can't measure
2015–2018 (per 2020 OIG report)
Sept 2025–Apr 2026 (Project Firewall)
The volume increase looks real and substantial — a 48% year-over-year jump in investigations, with 175+ new cases in Project Firewall's first two months alone, is a meaningfully faster clip than the historical average of roughly 206 per year. But volume isn't the same as outcomes. The 2020 report's most damning number wasn't the investigation count — it was the conversion rate from "violation found" to "debarment." That figure, for the Project Firewall era, hasn't been published anywhere we could find.
The open question: $15 million in back wages across 175+ investigations is a real number, but back wages are the weakest penalty in DOL's toolkit — they're often treated as a cost of doing business by larger employers. The 2020 report's core finding was about debarment specifically, because debarment is the only penalty that actually removes an employer's ability to keep using the program. If Project Firewall is running more investigations but debarring violators at a similar ~6% rate, the fundamental accountability gap the 2020 report identified would persist — just at higher volume.
Staffing firms and third-party placements are explicitly named
One detail stands out for relevance to everything we've covered in this series — the Texas A&M contractors, the OAG staffing placements, the 28 H-1B contractors at DOL itself. Industry coverage of Project Firewall specifically flags third-party placement arrangements as a priority target.
Per immigration law firm coverage, Project Firewall specifically targets: H-1B dependent employers (companies where H-1B workers make up a large share of the workforce), third-party placements — "IT consulting firms that place workers at client sites are receiving unprecedented levels of scrutiny regarding 'employer-employee' relationships" — and staffing agencies, where DOL is examining "whether these entities are truly employers or merely 'middlemen' circumventing wage laws."
This is directly on point for the patterns we've documented: 21 different staffing firms placing 28 contractors at DOL/BLS, the repeat-filer pattern from Raas Infotek, and the OAG's third-party IT placements through 3Core, MaxPro, and tekAssembly. If Project Firewall's stated priorities match its actual casework, these are exactly the kinds of arrangements it's designed to scrutinize — though there's no public indication any specific filing we've examined has been investigated.
A rare case of a watchdog recommendation actually being implemented
Whatever one thinks of the politics surrounding it, Project Firewall represents something uncommon in federal oversight: an Inspector General identified a specific unused authority in 2020, recommended its use, and five years later the agency built its flagship enforcement program around exactly that authority. The Secretary-certified investigation pathway — sitting dormant through at least four fiscal years of data and, per WHD's own admission, never used at all — is now, per DOL's own description, the "novel" centerpiece of the initiative.
What remains unverified is whether this translates into the outcome the 2020 report was actually concerned with: holding violators accountable through debarment, not just counting more investigations or collecting back wages. The Department has not published a debarment rate for Project Firewall cases. Until that number exists, it's possible to view Project Firewall as either a genuine structural fix to a five-year-old accountability gap, or a higher-volume version of the same enforcement model — more investigations, similar conversion to real consequences.
The mechanism changed. Whether the outcome did is the question that matters — and it's the one number DOL hasn't given anyone yet.
Read the original 2020 OIG report: 06-20-001-03-321.pdf · Compare with the DOL H-1B contractors report