While vacationing in India, engineer Amrutha Tamanam hurried back to the U.S. following Donald Trump’s sudden announcement of a $100,000 visa fee.
In her rush to return to the country she’s called home for a decade, she faced interference from racially motivated far-right trolls who organized a campaign called “clog the toilet” to disrupt flight bookings from India.
The White House later clarified that the new H-1B fee was a one-time payment not applicable to current holders. However, leading U.S. companies had already advised their overseas employees to return quickly to avoid the fee or risk being stranded abroad.
Tamanam, a software engineer based in Austin, searched for flights from Vijayawada as users on the far-right forum 4chan attempted to overwhelm reservation systems, aiming to block Indian visa holders from booking tickets.
One 4chan thread urged users to find India-U.S. flights, “start the checkout process” but “don’t complete it,” thus clogging the system and preventing visa holders from returning to the U.S. before the announcement took effect.
This campaign may have directly impacted Tamanam, who faced repeated airline website crashes. The checkout page, which usually allows a few minutes, timed out much faster.
After numerous attempts, she finally booked a one-way ticket to Dallas on Qatar Airways, costing around $2,000 — more than double her original round-trip fare.
“Booking a ticket was hard, and I paid a hefty price for panic travel,” Tamanam told AFP.
‘Keep them in India’
The 4chan thread — circulated among far-right Trump supporters on Telegram and other fringe forums — stated: “Indians are just waking up after the H1B news. Want to keep them in India? Clog the flight reservation system!”
Responding posts, filled with racist slurs, advised users to hold seats for popular India-U.S. routes on airline websites and booking platforms — without completing the purchase.
The aim was to block high-demand flights, making seat availability scarce and driving up prices.
Highlighting the campaign’s scope, one 4chan user shared a browser screenshot, claiming: “I got 100 seats locked.”
“Currently clogging the last available seat on this Delhi to Newark flight,” another user wrote.
Several 4chan users also mentioned holding seats on Air India and slowing the airline’s website. However, an Air India spokesperson told AFP the site faced no disruptions, with systems functioning normally.
‘Shared antipathy’
Though difficult to measure the campaign’s overall impact, the trolling aimed to “cause panic among H-1B visa holders,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
“The scary part of 4chan is its ability to radicalize people into extreme beliefs,” Beirich stated, noting that several U.S. mass shooters had posted manifestos on the site.
H-1B visas allow companies to sponsor foreign workers with specialized skills — like scientists and programmers — to work in the U.S., initially for three years but extendable to six.
The U.S. awards 85,000 H-1B visas annually through a lottery, with India accounting for about three-quarters of recipients.
In today’s information warfare, the troll operation shows how bad actors can launch disruptive attacks “with a keystroke,” explained Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.
“With growing nationalistic politics worldwide, an informal international alliance of adversaries will use aggressive tools, including the internet,” Levin told AFP.
“What’s crucial is how quickly it spread, the diversity of nations involved, and how shared antipathy across borders can be mobilized online.”
