Racist Online Campaign Targets Indian H-1B Visa Holders Rushing Back to US After Trump Announcement

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Software engineer Amrutha Tamanam was on vacation in India when Donald Trump unexpectedly announced a $100,000 fee for H-1B visa holders, prompting her to hurriedly book a flight back to the United States where she has lived for ten years. Simultaneously, far-right groups on platforms like 4chan orchestrated a racist campaign called "clog the toilet," attempting to prevent Indian visa holders from securing flights by disrupting online booking systems.

Although the White House later clarified that the new fee would not affect current visa holders, major US corporations had already advised their international employees to return immediately to avoid potential complications. Tamanam, who works in Austin, began searching for flights from Vijayawada while 4chan users were actively working to overwhelm airline reservation systems.

The coordinated effort encouraged users to begin the checkout process for India-US flights without completing the transactions, effectively blocking the system and preventing legitimate bookings before the new policy took effect.

Tamanam experienced the apparent consequences of this campaign firsthand, encountering multiple website crashes during her booking attempts. Checkout pages that normally allow several minutes to complete a transaction were timing out unusually quickly.

After several failed attempts, she finally managed to secure a one-way ticket to Dallas via Qatar Airways at approximately $2,000—more than twice the cost of her original round-trip fare.

"It was hard for me to book a ticket and I paid a huge fare for the panic travel," Tamanam told AFP.

On 4chan, the campaign thread explicitly stated its purpose: "Indians are just waking up after the H1B news. Want to keep them in India? Clog the flight reservation system!" Subsequent posts, many containing racist language, advised participants to hold seats on popular India-US routes without finalizing purchases, aiming to reduce availability and drive up prices on high-demand flights.

Demonstrating the campaign's scale, one user claimed to have "locked" 100 seats, while another reported blocking "the last available seat on this Delhi to Newark flight."

Multiple users targeted Air India specifically, claiming to hold seats and slow down the airline's website. However, an Air India spokesperson informed AFP that their systems operated normally with no disruptions.

Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told AFP that while measuring the campaign's overall effectiveness is challenging, its intent was clearly to "cause panic among H-1B visa holders." She noted that "the real scary thing about 4chan is its ability to radicalize people into extremist beliefs," adding that several American mass shooters had published manifestos on the platform.

H-1B visas allow companies to sponsor skilled foreign workers, such as scientists and programmers, for three-year periods that can be extended to six years. The United States issues 85,000 such visas annually through a lottery system, with approximately three-quarters going to Indian nationals.

Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, explained that this coordinated trolling operation shows how disruptive attacks can be launched "with the stroke of a keyboard" in today's information warfare landscape.

"As nationalistic politics takes hold across the world, an informal international association of opponents will use an array of aggressive tools, including the internet," Levin told AFP. "What I think is so relevant is how rapidly it spread, how diverse the nations represented were, and how shared antipathy across international borders can be mobilized online."