Travelers were spooked and freaked out over President Donald Trump’s Friday proclamation requiring H-1B visa applicants to pay a $100,000 fee as chaos spread at the San Francisco International Airport with some passengers demanding to leave an international flight, fearful of what would happen if they left the U.S.
An Emirates flight was set to take off from San Francisco to Dubai just after 5 p.m., but it was delayed three hours after passengers asked to disembark amid uncertainty over how the announcement would affect current H-1B visa holders, Reuters reports. The visas are a popular recruitment tool used by American companies to attract foreign workers to the U.S.
Trump’s proclamation sparked chaos and confusion as questions mounted over exactly how current visa holders will be impacted. Current H-1B visa holders can still leave and re-enter the country as normal, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Saturday.
One Instagram video from the flight shows passengers standing up, speaking to their fellow passengers and using their phones as the pilot announced via loudspeaker that they could leave the plane.
“Due to the current circumstances, obviously they’re unprecedented for us here at Emirates, we are aware that a number of passengers do not wish to travel with us and that is perfectly fine,” the captain said over the loudspeaker.
An engineer at a large tech company whose wife was on the Emirates flight told Reuters at least five people chose to disembark. His wife, an H-1B visa holder, decided to still head to India to care for her sick mother, he said.
“It is a situation where we had to choose between family and staying here,” he said.
“It’s quite tragic,” he added. “We have built a life here.”
Emirates declined to comment to The Independent.
H-1B visas bring highly skilled foreign workers to the U.S. for jobs that are deemed difficult to fill. Since 2012, about 60 percent of all H-1B visas have gone to workers in computer-related jobs, according to the Pew Research Center.
“Those who already hold H-1B visas and are currently outside of the country right now will NOT be charged $100,000 to re-enter,” Leavitt wrote on X. “H-1B visa holders can leave and re-enter the country to the same extent as they normally would; whatever ability they have to do that is not impacted by yesterday’s proclamation.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also told reporters in the Oval Office it would be an annual fee, but Leavitt later clarified that it’s a “one-time fee that applies only to the petition.”
Several H-1B visa holders who were traveling Friday were caught off guard and rushed to return to the U.S. One woman demanded to get off a flight from New York to Paris after hearing about the news, Reuters reports. The flight was already taxiing, but the pilot agreed to let her off.
“My feelings are a mix of disappointment, sadness, and frustration,” she said.
One woman who works at a semiconductor company in Silicon Valley told Wired she heard about the news immediately after landing in her hometown in China. Her manager urged her to return as soon as possible, and she told Wired she started looking for a flight back to the U.S. before even meeting her family at the airport.
Zoey, a software developer at Microsoft in Seattle, was also in China when she got the news. She booked a flight back to the U.S. on four hours notice, she told Wired.
