Santa Clara’s Cloudera barred from green-card sponsorship program for two years

The data-software company will pay up to $2 million to settle federal claims that it shut American applicants out of jobs earmarked for visa holders, as Washington widens a crackdown that now reaches Silicon Valley.

By Staff Reporter

Cloudera, the Santa Clara data-management company, has agreed to stop sponsoring foreign employees for permanent residency for two years and to pay up to $2 million to resolve federal allegations that it discriminated against American workers, the Justice and Labor Departments announced on Friday.

The settlement turns on an unusual detail. According to the agreement, federal investigators found that when Cloudera ran the recruitment that the government requires before a company can sponsor a worker for a green card, it did not post those jobs on its public careers site, as it did for other openings, and instead told applicants to send résumés to a dedicated email address. That address, the government said, could not receive email from outside the company. Americans who followed the instructions were never considered.

Cloudera denies wrongdoing. In the agreement, the company “maintains it complied with the Act, denies IER’s allegations, and asserts that it acted without any discriminatory intent,” and says that once it learned of a potential problem with the address, it withdrew its applications, halted processing and took corrective action. A Cloudera spokesperson told Bloomberg Law that the address had been inadvertently restricted to internal employees, and said, as Newsweek also reported, “Cloudera does not discriminate against anyone in making hiring decisions, and we remain firmly committed to fair, lawful, and open recruitment practices.”

What the company agreed to

Under the terms, Cloudera will pay $600,000 in civil penalties to the Treasury and create a back-pay fund of $1.4 million for qualified American workers whom the Justice Department’s Immigrant and Employee Rights Section determines were denied fair consideration. The fund covers recruitment conducted between March 31, 2024, and Jan. 28, 2025, and eligible claimants must be identified within 300 days.

In a separate section with the Labor Department, Cloudera agreed to withdraw pending applications whose recruitment cited the nonfunctional address and to “self debar” from the program for 24 months. For the settlement’s three-year term, it must recruit for sponsored positions the way it recruits for any other job, posting them on its career sites and accepting online applications, and it will submit to monitoring and reporting.

“There are no exceptions: the Justice Department will hold accountable employers who discriminate against U.S. workers,” Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in the department’s statement.

The program at issue, known as PERM, for permanent labor certification, is the first step for most employer-sponsored green cards. Before a company can sponsor an employee already here on a temporary visa, such as an H-1B, it must test the labor market and certify that no qualified, willing and available American applied. The government’s case against Cloudera, filed in April before the immigration-law administrative court, began with a complaint from one U.S. worker whose application bounced back.

A crackdown that has moved up the Peninsula

For the Bay Area, the Cloudera case is less notable for its size than for what it signals. The Justice Department described it as the 14th settlement since it relaunched its Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative in 2025, an effort it says targets employers who favor holders of temporary work visas. The Labor Department had already suspended processing of all of Cloudera’s PERM applications for 180 days in May.

That tool has since been used far more broadly. On Oct. 8, the Labor Department suspended eight employers from the program, including Microsoft and San Jose-based Adobe, along with the outsourcing firms Cognizant, Infosys, Capgemini, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro and HCL Technologies. Keith Sonderling, who leads the Labor Department, said Adobe and Microsoft were suspended “due to multiple active federal investigations,” CNBC reported. Microsoft said in a statement that “the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans.” The government has not publicly detailed the allegations against Adobe.

According to an analysis by the immigration firm Ellis, pending cases from the suspended companies are frozen with no end date. Because employers generally must file within 180 days of their recruitment, a long pause can force a company to restart its search, and the workers in line lose time.

What it means for Silicon Valley employers

Few regions depend on that pipeline as heavily as Silicon Valley, whose engineering teams include many workers who arrived on temporary visas and hope to stay. Cloudera is a mature enterprise company, not a startup: it merged with its rival Hortonworks in 2019 and was taken private in 2021 by the investment firms Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and KKR in a deal valued at about $5.3 billion.

The lesson in the fine print is procedural. The government did not allege that Cloudera underpaid sponsored workers, the more familiar complaint about visa programs. Its case rested on how the company ran the search, and the remedy requires that sponsored jobs be handled like any other opening rather than on a separate track.

For Cloudera employees in the sponsorship pipeline, the consequence is a two-year wait before the company can file again. For other Bay Area employers, the case and the Oct. 8 suspensions suggest that federal scrutiny of green-card sponsorship, long treated as a back-office function, now reaches well beyond the outsourcing firms that were once its main focus.