Feds allege this Big Tech company violated federal law with bizarre scheme to avoid hiring US citizens

An American tech company is being sued by the Department of Justice for allegedly discriminating against U.S. workers.

Instead of hiring Americans, the company allegedly favored hiring workers with temporary visas, going to bizarre lengths to prevent U.S. workers from being able to properly apply for its vacant jobs.

'Employers cannot use the PERM sponsorship process as a back door for discriminating against US workers.'

Cloudera is a software company based in Santa Clara, California, that predominantly stores data and was started in 2008 by former engineers from Google, Yahoo, and Facebook.

In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, the DOJ said the company violated the Immigration and Nationality Act by intentionally discriminating against Americans.

The federal lawsuit said the company "upended its normal hiring process and did exactly what the law prohibits. ... Cloudera did not consider the applications some U.S. worker candidates submitted because the company earmarked certain jobs for workers on temporary employment visas."

Cloudera was accused of posting openings for at least seven jobs — paying between $180,000 and $294,000 per year — that asked U.S. applicants to submit applications to a dedicated email address. However, the address did not accept messages from external email accounts, and applicants simply received an error message in response.

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Therefore Cloudera did not have any record of a person applying for particular roles, the DOJ stated.

The alleged end result was Cloudera attempting to fill the roles with temporary foreign workers through the permanent labor certification process, while "repeatedly" telling the Department of Labor that it couldn't find any qualified American workers.

"Employers cannot use the PERM sponsorship process as a back door for discriminating against U.S. workers," said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon. "The Division will not hesitate to sue companies who intentionally deter U.S. workers from applying to American jobs."

The DOJ said an American worker alleged discrimination after attempting to apply to Cloudera via the designated email address but "received a bounce-back notification."

Cloudera spokeswoman Hannah Fairbanks said in a statement to Blaze News that the company is "proud to hire American workers."

"We do not discriminate against U.S. workers — or anyone — on the basis of citizenship status. We take the DOJ’s allegations seriously, and from the start, we have cooperated fully with the DOJ’s investigation, which stems from a recruiting email account that was simply not working as intended," she continued.

"We believe the government's claims misunderstand both our hiring processes and our intent, and we will address the matter through the appropriate legal channels. Cloudera is committed to fair, lawful, and open recruitment practices, and we will continue to cooperate with the DOJ as we work to resolve this matter. Because this is now pending litigation, we cannot comment further at this time."

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Cloudera co-founder Amr Awadallah. Anthony Kwan/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Cloudera is charged with one count of discrimination in hiring: deterring U.S. workers; one count of discrimination in hiring: failing to consider U.S. workers; and one count of discrimination in hiring: failing to hire U.S. workers.

Cloudera had a reported revenue of $869.3 million for fiscal year 2021 and was sold that October in an all-cash deal for approximately $5.3 billion.

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