Six Months In, Zero Institutions Have Asked Texas's Permission to Hire an H-1B Worker

The Mechanism The Order Actually Created

Abbott's letter doesn't ban Texas public universities and state agencies from sponsoring H-1B workers outright — it makes it conditional. The operative line:

That written-permission requirement is the entire enforcement mechanism. There's no penalty specified for filing without it, no independent auditor checking compliance, and no statute behind it — just a governor's directive to entities within his own appointment authority, plus a second requirement that every covered agency and university report its existing H-1B sponsorship data to TWC by March 27, 2026. Six months on, both halves of that mechanism turn out to have the same problem: nobody outside TWC and the institutions themselves can see whether either one is actually being used.

TWC Built A Form. It Doesn't Publish Anything.

TWC's own H-1B Visa Program Permission Request page, which the commission didn't stand up until early April 2026 — more than two months after the freeze took effect — is a contact form, not a transparency page. An institution picks its name from a list of roughly 200 state agencies and higher-education entities, enters a headcount of H-1B beneficiaries (capped at 50, with a warning to double-check anything over 20), and submits. TWC then emails back a "petition package" with instructions. Nothing about how many requests have come in, how many were approved, or on what basis is posted anywhere on the page or linked from it.

TWC also narrowed who even needs to use that form. In a March 13, 2026 email to institutions, TWC Director of Human Resources Jerry White clarified that written permission is only required for a prospective worker currently living outside the United States — the population subject to the Trump administration's $100,000 H-1B petition fee. Renewals, and "certain status changes from students and recent graduates already in the country," don't require permission at all. Separately, TWC's guidance states permission "will not be granted" for workers from a list of prohibited countries that includes China — notable because Chinese nationals are, per Houston Public Media's reporting, "one of the most common countries of origin among MD Anderson's H-1B workers."

The Number That Matters: Zero

As of July 17, 2026 — per Houston Public Media's reporting, the most recent figure publicly available — zero public universities or state agencies had submitted a permission request to TWC. Not one. That's not "TWC has been slow to process requests" — it's that the front door to the freeze's only stated enforcement mechanism had not been used by a single one of the roughly 200 entities it covers, more than five months after the freeze took effect and more than three months after TWC finally built the portal to use it.

Meanwhile, our own review of DOL's H-1B labor condition application data (FY2026 Q3 snapshot, deduplicated by case number — see the companion report for how we caught and corrected a duplication issue in DOL's own quarterly files) shows Texas public universities and the two state agencies in this data with matching filings — Texas Health and Human Services Commission and Texas Department of State Health Services — filed 326 new-employment H-1B labor condition applications between February 1 and June 30, 2026. DOL has already certified 298 of them. It has denied none. Every one of those 326 filings represents, at minimum, a job an institution decided to fill with a new H-1B hire rather than a Texan, during the exact window the freeze covers — and TWC's own records show none of the institutions filing them asked its permission first.

One honest caveat: TWC's narrower March guidance means not every one of these 326 filings necessarily required a permission request — a status change for a beneficiary already inside the U.S. wouldn't need one, and DOL's LCA data doesn't record where a beneficiary currently lives. What TWC's own "zero" figure shows regardless is that the formal channel built to test any of these cases — abroad or not — has never once been used to make that determination on the record.

By Institution, Since The Freeze (Universities + State Agencies)

Texas Health and Human Services Commission had no new-employment LCA filings in this window despite having filed H-1B renewals/other LCA types earlier in FY2026. Full institution-level detail in the companion report.

When Reporters Asked TWC To Explain, TWC Pointed At The Records Law

We're not the only outlet that went looking for these numbers and came up empty. Dallas Express found that UT Austin kept 17 "Notices of Intent to Hire" publicly posted during the freeze, and that Texas State University maintained active "Notice of Filing" postings for what it described as H-1B extensions — the kind of filing universities argue falls outside the freeze's scope entirely. When Dallas Express asked TWC directly to clarify how it was distinguishing compliant filings from noncompliant ones, TWC declined to comment and directed the outlet to file a Texas Public Information Act request instead. That's the agency's answer to a basic factual question about its own six-month-old directive: file paperwork and wait.

Independent outlet Current Revolt did exactly that. After Texas Tech posted a Labor Condition Application for a "Web Developer, Marketing & Communications" position — $60,000 over three years, listing both the Lubbock campus and a specific rental house as worksites, a pattern that reads more like an existing visa holder's extension than a genuinely new hire — reporters Tommy Paine and Tex Rex filed an open-records request with TWC on July 15, 2026, for "every freeze exception requested and granted by any state agency or university since January 27," plus the specific list of H-1B workers Texas Tech was required to report under the governor's own directive. They expected a response within ten business days. As of the most recent published reporting we could locate, no results from that request had been reported — meaning as far as the public record shows, the question "has TWC ever granted one of these waivers" remains formally unanswered more than a month after someone asked TWC directly, in writing, under state law.

The Loophole Nobody Needs A Waiver For

Separately, an investigation by VisaVerge found that the freeze's coverage has a hole built into its own definition: it binds the state agency or public university itself, but not a private company working under contract to that agency. A university can't file a new H-1B petition without permission — but a staffing or IT-services contractor doing the same work for that same university, under a state contract, can keep sponsoring H-1B workers exactly as before, because the contractor was never covered by the order in the first place. VisaVerge's review of a sample of state contractor filings in the weeks after the order found no holds or enforcement activity at all. Between that structural gap and the "already in the country" and "renewal" carve-outs TWC's own March guidance created, there are at least three distinct, lawful paths to hiring a foreign worker into Texas state government's orbit that this freeze was never designed to touch.

Not Costless For Everyone

None of this means the order has zero effect anywhere. UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center — which Houston Public Media reported sponsors roughly 277 H-1B workers, filed 853 H-1B petitions between 2020 and 2025, and has spent an estimated $2.78 million on H-1B-related costs, with most positions "tied directly to cancer research and treatment" — is one of the institutions with the most to lose from TWC's prohibited-countries provision specifically, since China is both on that list and one of the most common countries of origin for its H-1B researchers. State Rep. Ann Johnson (D-Houston) and immigration attorneys quoted in that reporting warned the restriction could slow specific, hard-to-replace research hiring even as the freeze's broader compliance mechanism goes essentially unused. The order's practical bite, in other words, looks uneven: heaviest on institutions and nationalities the prohibited-countries list happens to catch, close to nonexistent everywhere else.

A Parallel Order, Same Design

Florida's order predates Texas's by three months and took a different institutional path — a university-system board vote rather than a governor's direct letter — but the design is nearly identical: block new H-1B hires at public universities, leave existing H-1B employees and renewals untouched, and set an expiration date roughly coincident with the next full budget/legislative cycle (January 5, 2027 in Florida; May 31, 2027 in Texas). Neither order applies to private employers. We have not run the same LCA-level compliance check against Florida's public university system that this report and its companion ran against Texas's — that would be a natural next step — but the structural parallel is exact enough to ask the same question in both states: an order that exempts renewals, exempts contractors, and exempts anyone already living in the country is an order that, by its own terms, was never going to touch most of the actual hiring pipeline it was announced to stop.

Investigative Assessment

💬 Comments