Lawsuit: Indian H-1B Worker Paid Indian CEO for Job in United States | Neil Munro, Breitbart
An Indian H-1B contract worker paid his employer almost $100,000 to keep the Michigan job that provided him with a path to a green card and citizenship, according to a lawsuit filed by the Banias Law firm.
Sai Jitender Kalagara and Progress Solutions Inc. โrecruited and hired plaintiff Rishi Meesala,โ the lawsuit says:
Then they successfully petitioned for him to join their team on an H-1B visa. Things looked up for Plaintiff. But Defendants then started demanding Plaintiff pay his own salary. Defendants also refused to provide Plaintiff pay stubs, which are necessary for H1B holders to transfer to a different H-1B employer, unless Plaintiff paid them. Then, when Plaintiff pushed back, they threatened him with ICE, threatened his father, and continued to refuse to pay him. These acts constitute labor trafficking, forced labor, and document servitude are crimes.
Breitbart News has reported on similar examples of employersโ ability to extort H-1B migrants as they work their way through multiple visa programs to get the big prize of a green card and legal immigrant status. The white-collar H-1B population is huge โ roughly 750,000 contract workers plus roughly 250,000 spouses on H4EAD work permits โ and the abuse is nationwide, routine, profitable, and deeply damaging to Americans who want decent salaries, working conditions, and career prospects.
In this case, Rishi entered as a postgraduate student and signed up for George W. Bushโs three-year Optional Practical Training (OPT) program in December 2023. Like many Indians before him, Richi jumped from the OPT program to the renewable, mixed-skill H-1B program in October 2024.
But on his first H-1B day at the company, โKalagara placed Rishi on the โbench,โ told him they would not pay him while he was on the bench, and demanded cash payments from Rishi,โ the lawsuit says.
โYes, they demanded their employee pay the employerโto issue payroll, violating antiโbenching [H-1B] laws,โ the suit says, adding:
12. Progress and Kalagara know that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (โUSCISโ) requires regular pay rolls to be run for any extension or transfer H-1B application [to another employer].
13. Thus, by threatening to forgo payroll, Progress and Kalagara were implicitly threatening Rishi with his immigration status. If they didnโt run Rishiโs payroll, Rishi would not be able to maintain, extend, or transfer his H-1B.
14. Rishi thus delivered approximately $8,800 in cash to Progressโs Plano office under threat of losing his [H-1B] immigration status.
โDefendants owe Rishi at least $97,248.94 in unpaid wages and coerced payments,โ the November 2025 lawsuit says.
A company official told Breitbart News on June 12 that Kalagara was in India. Neither he nor the company responded to questions from Breitbart News.
Indentured H-1B Workers
Each year, roughly 250,000 Indians get into the OPT program or the companion Curricula Practical Training program, and roughly 80,000 more fight their way onto the H-1B ladder.
The competition is brutal for poor Indians, many of whom go deeply into debt โ often with government-backed loans โ to fund their OPT work permits and living costs in the United States. The debts are usually backed by mortgaged family property and cannot be paid off unless the Indian keeps a job in the United States.
But the payoffs can be huge, partly because some land very well-paid jobs in the tech sector, the Fortune 500, and Silicon Valley. The elite jobs provide high salaries, social status, stock plans, homes, workplace allies, and cars โ and also the opportunity to quietly sell the jobs held by American colleagues to the next wave of similar-background Indian fortune-seekers. โIt would be a career transformation for me,โ India student Ravi Bushan told CBS News.
Most Indians, however, get sweatshop jobs in a pyramid of โbodyshopโ subcontractors where they work long hours for low wages as leased workers to other Indian-run subcontractors. Their wages are kept low because the multiple layers of cooperating subcontractor CEOs higher in the pyramid skim the high wages nominally paid by Fortune 500 companies.
The layer system allows cooperating ethnic Indian CEOs to gain huge profits by importing desperate H-1B workers to underbid normal American contractors and their American professional workforce.
This semi-secret pyramid scheme has pushed a generation of American out of IT careers โ and keeps at least 1 million submissive Indians laboring in jobs that would be held by free-seeking American professionals.
American media outlets have ignored this abusive industry practice for decades, even when it is right in front of their nose. For example, ethnic Indian Shanelle Kaul at CBS News reported on June 13:
Kishore Khandavalli โฆ runs a software consulting company in Dallas, where nearly half of his 380 employees have H-1B visas โฆ According to Khandavalli, there essentially isnโt enough available U.S. talent in his sector.
News reports show that many thousands of skilled American professionals are being laid off by Fortune 500 companies, even as their subcontractors claim labor shortages and annually import at least 250,000 Indians via the various H-1B, H4EAD, L-1, J-1, and B1/B2 programs. American C-Suite executives do not publicly complain about the H-1B abuse, partly because their peers stand to gain from stock bonuses created by perceived or real payroll savings.
But many Indians rationally accept the workplace abuse โ and many buy their way into the workplace abuse โ because the H-1B program allows Indian migrants to climb a career ladder all the way to U.S residency and citizenship. In contrast, Americans can trump the abuser by simply finding another job.
That prize is immeasurably valuable because it allows Indians to transform into independent American citizens โ and to grant that amazing transformation to their close family, and all of their descendants.
With green cards, the migrants never need to return to Indiaโs society of new rich, ancient poverty, Darwinian workplace culture, and zero-sum struggles for status. Unless, of course, the migrants prefer the easy availability of Indiaโs cheap, lower-caste servants.
Indian graduates โknow before they ever leave India that they will have to pay every rung on the ladder to get here and stay here,โ said Jay Palmer, co-founder of Project Eradicate, which uses lawsuits to expose fraud and help migrant workers. He added:
The H-1B is a vehicle out of poverty-stricken India โฆ How would they go back once they have tasted the fruits of suburban America? Who can blame them?
The gulf between India and the United States gives CEOs huge leverage to exploit their U.S.-based Indian workers, he said. โIndian staffing agencies and businesses continue to operate as if they are in the Wild West,โ he added.
On June 4, for example, the Department of Justice announced it was seeking to naturalize and deport an Indian-born legal immigrant who violated numerous laws while operating an H-1B staffing company.
Before the Court, Defendant admitted that, between April 25, 2015, and April 27, 2017, he signed and filed eleven H-1B visa petitions containing fraudulent documents and false statements made under penalty of perjury and that he had known that those statements were false and material to USCISโs adjudication of the visa petitions.
Specifically, Defendant filed visa petitions with USCIS that contained (a) Defendantโs false statements that he had secured full-time employment for the foreign worker beneficiaries of the H-1B visas at a bank, and (b) fraudulent letters on the bankโs letterhead with forged signatures of bank executives.
In April, the Department of Homeland Security announced:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Servicesโ fraud detection efforts resulted in the guilty pleas of Sampath Rajidi, 51, and Sreedhar Mada, 51, to conspiracy to commit visa fraud, U.S. Attorney Eric Grant announced last week.
According to court documents, Rajidi operated two visa servicing companies, S-Team Software Inc. and Uptrend Technologies LLC. As part of the business models of S-Team and Uptrend, Rajidi petitioned for H1-B specialty occupation worker visas to obtain foreign workers for temporary placement with various companies. Mada was chief information officer of University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources in Davis, California. Mada had supervisory authority but could not hire H1-B workers for his department without further authorization.
Between June 2020 and January 2023, Rajidi and Mada conspired to submit fraudulent H-1B visa petitions for numerous aliens. On those petitions, Rajidi falsely represented that these aliens would be working at the University of California. Mada lent his name and the credibility of his position to support the false assertion that they would work on projects for the University of California.
In reality, both Rajidi and Mada knew that the positions listed on the petitions did not exist and the aliens did not work on projects at the University of California. They submitted false information, knowing it would influence USCISโ decision about granting these visas. After they successfully got H1-B visas for these aliens based on false employment information, they marketed these aliens as employees to other clients. As a result of their conspiracy, Rajidi and Mada gained an unfair advantage over other firms and reduced the pool of H-1B visas available to competing firms.
Many Indian migrants leave โpoor or middle-class families in India โ often dealing with generations of reservation and religious struggles,โ an Indian migrant in North Carolina posted on X. He added:
But after arriving, too many start looting honest Americans and even other Indians [via] Fake degrees, fake experience, forged bank loans, fake insurance claims, [Covid payments] fraud, real estate scams, human trafficking.
breitbart.com/immigration/20โฆ