The U.S. Department of Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced a $5 million settlement with Maplebear Inc., which does business as Instacart, over recruitment the agencies say shut U.S. workers out of jobs the company was advertising as part of the green-card process. The settlement, announced Oct. 20, is the fifteenth the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has reached under its Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative since the program was relaunched in 2025.
At the center of the case is the Permanent Labor Certification, or PERM, program — the first step for most employers sponsoring a worker for an EB-2 or EB-3 green card. Before filing, an employer must test the U.S. labor market and show that no qualified, willing and available U.S. worker could be found. The agencies said Instacart ran that recruitment differently from its normal hiring: for positions advertised under PERM, applicants had to mail paper applications, while the company’s standard process accepted electronic ones. DOJ said the extra step meant many U.S. workers who applied were not considered in time, and the EEOC said its own investigation uncovered similar evidence. The agencies alleged citizenship-status discrimination under the Immigration and Nationality Act and national-origin discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
Under the settlement, Instacart will set up a fund of up to $4 million for applicants — and “deterred” applicants — affected between December 2023 and February 2026, and pay $1 million in civil penalties to the United States. The company must also post PERM positions on its public careers website, accept electronic applications, train staff on its anti-discrimination obligations, revise its employment policies, and submit to monitoring and reporting. A claims administrator will contact potentially eligible people; until it sets up a contact address, the agencies ask anyone who believes they were affected to email [email protected].
The case sits on the employer side of the green-card pipeline rather than the applicant’s. A PERM recruitment that is harder for U.S. workers to use than the company’s ordinary hiring is now a discrimination risk with a price attached, and the agencies are looking at how those job advertisements were run. For a foreign national waiting on a PERM-based EB-2 or EB-3 sponsorship, the settlement does not change an individual case. It follows the Labor Department’s Oct. 8 suspension of PERM processing at eight large employers, another enforcement step aimed at the labor-market test that precedes most employment-based green cards.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said the department would keep pursuing employers that prefer workers with temporary employment visas. Since the initiative’s original launch, DOJ says it has secured more than $34 million in back pay and $16 million in civil penalties from employers found to have discriminated against U.S. workers.
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Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, and U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission