Vice President JD Vance on Thursday announced the suspension of tech giants, Microsoft and Adobe, from a green card program — effectively blocking the companies from sponsoring H-1B visa workers for permanent residency green cards.

The suspension is from the PERM program — a certification that allows employers to hire a foreign employee to work permanently in the U.S.

Vance singled out Microsoft, accusing the company of fraud.

“So if the H-1B visa is how the people get into the country, the PERM program is how they stay in the United States to begin with,” Vance said. “Now there has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused the system more than Microsoft.”

In a statement to ABC News, Microsoft said it “succeeds as a global technology leader by developing the world’s best technology workforce. We do this by strengthening this country’s talent pipeline, hiring American workers, and attracting the best talent from around the world.”

Critics of the PERM program have said it allows companies to recruit foreign workers, taking away jobs from Americans. Vance alleged Microsoft employees were laid off — later replaced by “foreign indentured servants” who “are earning wages that are far below the average for American citizens.”

“So, in the last year, Microsoft — and I want to be clear about the data here, so let me check this — but Microsoft laid off last year 6,000 American workers,” Vance said. “At the same time, the company benefited from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards.”

“In other words, if you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants.”

Microsoft said in a statement that “the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans.”

It also pushed back on Vance’s comments, saying it “only files H-1B petitions for those who meet the rigorous standards of this visa category.”

“We pay our employees some of the highest compensation in the tech sector, and our wages are among the highest of all H-1B filings. We pay our H-1B employees the same as any other employees doing comparable work,” the statement continued.

The criticism of Microsoft came hours before President Donald Trump awarded Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella the Medal of Technology and Innovation during an event at the Institute of Peace on Thursday.

Trump lauded Nadella at the ceremony, saying he has been “a key figure in the transformation of Microsoft, revolutionizing the company and empowering businesses, students and consumers from all over the world with some of the most capable software ever built or ever even conceived.”

Vance acknowledged the contradiction of honoring Microsoft’s CEO the same day as his announcement.

“Microsoft is a great American company, and we have a great relationship with them. They do a lot of important things,” Vance said. “So we’re going to continue to support Microsoft and have a great relationship with Microsoft, but we’re also going to deny them the ability to apply for these permanent residencies until they show that they are going to get serious about putting American workers first.”

ABC News has reached out to Adobe for comment.

Asked how long the suspension will be in place, Vance said it will “last as long as it needs to” and added that the administration has “a number of tools to suspend it indefinitely” if needed.

Vance, who has been asked to lead the administration’s Anti-Fraud Task Force, also criticized the H-1B visa program as a whole, saying it has become “rife with fraud” in recent years.

“The H-1B visa program is meant to allow companies to bring in really the best of the best from outside the United States of America for positions that are completely impossible to fill with American workers. Unfortunately, the program has become rife with fraud over the last several years, probably the last several decades,” Vance said.

Attorney General Todd Blanche also chimed in about the issue of “foreign labor favoritism,” promising that companies will be investigated if they “discriminate against an American worker in favor of someone on the other side of the world,” with Blanche saying this “violate[s] the trust of the federal government and the American people.”

“The Department of Justice, my department, is actively investigating companies that do this that favor foreign workers over the American people,” Blanche said.

Inspector General of Labor Anthony D’Esposito also announced that the Department of Labor is conducting a “historic investigation into the J-1 visa fraud involving nine major American universities: Pitt, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Brown, UC Davis, CaltTech, Arizona State, and MIT,” with investigations already underway, he said.

“If an American university is breaking the law to save a dollar, while exposing American research to a foreign adversary, that is not academic excellence. It’s institutional betrayal,” D’Esposito said.

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The execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army major who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others in a 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, will be live-streamed, a Pentagon official told ABC News on Thursday.

Hasan, who described the attack as an act of jihad, is scheduled to executed by firing squad on Dec. 3 at the same base where he committed the attack.

Public executions were once common in the U.S., but states began restricting and abolishing the practice in the mid 19th and early 20th centuries. The last widely recognized public execution was carried out in Kentucky in 1936.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a media interview that Fort Hood was chosen because that was where Hasan carried out the attack and that the 1 p.m. execution time was selected to roughly coincide with when the shooting began.

President Donald Trump ordered the Army to execute Hasan, which would be its first execution since 1961, and to do so by firing squad. The military has not used that method since 1945 and no longer has a modern procedure for administering it.

The choice of a firing squad forced the Army to abandon months of planning built around a very different kind of execution. Internal documents reviewed by ABC News show that officials had been preparing to use lethal injection if Trump authorized the execution of one of the four prisoners on the service’s death row.

Trump’s approval last Friday came only days after the botched lethal-injection execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee, who survived. Pike had been sentenced to death for her role in a 1995 murder.

John Galligan, a retired Army colonel and former military judge at Fort Hood, has represented Hasan for years as a civilian attorney and said he spoke with him Wednesday.

Hasan represented himself during his court-martial but Galligan remained involved in his legal counsel. He told ABC News that Hasan was notified late at night that Trump had approved the execution and that no defense attorney was present when he received the notice.

Last year, the Supreme Court declined to review Hasan’s court-martial conviction. However, Hasan could still seek habeas corpus relief in federal court, potentially delaying the execution.

Following his conversation yesterday with Hasan, Galligan said filing for a habeas petition is “a distinct possibility,” but that they have not yet made a final decision on how they will proceed.

Galligan criticized the Army for scheduling the execution close to the earliest date allowed under its regulations saying officials are, “pushing to get this done at earliest time possible.”

He was especially critical of the decision to carry out the execution at Fort Hood, citing medical concerns for how Hasan, who is paralyzed and in a wheelchair as a result of military officers who subdued him during the shooting, will be transported to the facility. Hasan is currently imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Army rules require an execution to be scheduled between 60 and 150 days after presidential approval, placing Hasan’s execution almost as early as the rules permit.

Galligan said that Hasan’s demeanor was calm after receiving the news of Trump’s approval of his execution Monday, but that he was surprised when Galligan told him that the execution would take place at Fort Hood.

“I’m surprised and shocked that they want to bring him back to Fort Hood. I think it’s more of a public spectacle, closely akin to almost, I see it more as political theater,” Galligan said, adding that making the execution public is, “not great for the confidence in our system of justice.”

 

Hegseth’s push for Hasan’s execution

 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, meanwhile, has pushed for Hasan’s execution for much of his tenure, according to two U.S. officials, but his focus on the case predates his time at the Pentagon.

In 2015, during an appearance on Fox News making the case that troops should be permitted to carry weapons on military bases, Hegseth invoked the Fort Hood shooting. “We are at war. Islamics are at war with us,” he said.

A decade later, in his role as Pentagon chief, Hegseth made his position on Hasan more explicit. “I am 100% committed to ensuring the death penalty is carried out for Nidal Hasan,” he told The Hill in September last year. “The victims and survivors deserve justice without delays.”

Internal documents reviewed by ABC News show that, since at least February, Army officials were developing a plan dubbed “Operation Resolute Justice.”

That plan envisioned lethal injection if the president authorized an execution in Terre Haute, Indiana, at the same prison complex where a series of federal executions happened during Trump’s first term.

From the mid-1980s until 2023, lethal injection was the default method of Army executions, until their rules were rewritten to give the Army secretary broad authority as to execution methods.

A military court can impose a death sentence, but carrying it out requires a separate chain of civilian approval. The service secretary, in this case acting Army Secretary Adam Telle, who has been in the job for about a month, must first sign off. The decision then goes to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth before ultimately reaching the president, who has the final authority to approve the execution.

 

How the Army has conducted firing squad executions

 

Among the unanswered questions are how the Army will select the soldiers who would serve as executioners and how it will train them for a task the military has not carried out in more than a half-century.

The Army’s most detailed procedures for carrying out an execution by firing squad date to 1959 and have not been updated since. The Army is quickly developing a new procedure on conducting firing squad executions, according to a service official.

But under those old execution rules, a condemned prisoner would be given consistent access to a chaplain, and, when practical, reasonable final requests, according to documentation reviewed by ABC News.

The execution itself called for eight riflemen led by a senior enlisted soldier armed with a pistol. The firing squad would take up position in a straight line, 15 paces from the prisoner, whose wrists and ankles would be restrained. A chaplain could remain with the prisoner up until the final moments before the shooting is ordered.

Between one and three of the eight rifles would be loaded with blanks, and the shooters would select their weapons at random. The prisoner would be dressed in a military uniform stripped of awards, insignia and other markings.

After being given an opportunity to make a final statement, the prisoner would be hooded and a medical officer would place a four-inch target over the heart. The chaplain and medical officer would then move away.

The firing squad would be ordered to aim and fire simultaneously. If the prisoner survived, the rules called for the senior enlisted leader of the firing squad to approach with their pistol, aim above the prisoner’s ear and fire 12 inches from the head.

It is unclear how closely the Army will adhere to those decades-old procedures in Hasan’s case, or how they might be adapted for a prisoner who is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair.

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