No agency is tracking the number of Indians stuck in India owing to H-1B visa stamping delay.
As thousands of H-1B visa holders are stuck in India with no appointment date available in 2026, immigration attorney Rosanna Berardi said they have no idea when these people will be finally able to come back to the US.
“The government’s playing games with social media vetting. And we have no ETA on when [they] are coming back,” Berardi told The San Francisco Standard. “These are individuals who were lawfully in the US.”The Standard narrated the story of a San Jose woman from Hyderabad who had to return to India in November for a family emergency. The woman, an electric vehicle engineer, has her husband and two children in the US, whom she last saw before she traveled to India in November.
The woman, identified by her initials JK, got her visa stamped multiple times in India and so she didn’t anticipate a problem even when the US State Department announced that all H-1B visa renewals would be subjected to a social media screening.
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But when she went to schedule her renewal, there were no appointments. “I think it’s an inhuman way of rejecting people from their visa,” JK said. “It’s been almost four months.
They should’ve been able to find a solution if they really wanted to help.”Owing to the social media vetting, there was a rescheduling of all visa appointments and December interviews were deferred to March, April 2026, pushing all dates behind in a domino effect. While thousands are believed to be affected, no agency has been tracking how many H-1B visa holders have got stranded in India. The Hyderabad woman has spent over a decade in the US, came to the US on a student visa and got hired by a tech company that sponsored their first H-1B visa.
She got married in 2010 and the couple, now the parents of two US citizens by birth, settled in San Jose. They have applied for Green Cards.JK told the San Francisco Standard that her company allowed her to work from India but in San Jose time which is 12.5 hours behind Indian local time. JK said her husband requested help from Congressman Reo Jimmy Panetta, His office contacted the US consulate in Hyderabad but the consulate said they could not expedite her visa stamping without an appointment.
