Trolls hit Indian visa holders rushing to US

Vacationing in India, engineer Amrutha Tamanam rushed to return to the United States after Donald Trump abruptly announced a $100,000 fee for the visa she holds.

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As she scrambled to get back to the country she's called home for a decade, racially motivated far-right trolls launched coordinated efforts to disrupt flight bookings from India, calling their campaign "clog the toilet."

The White House would later clarify that the new H-1B fee was a onetime payment not applicable to current holders. But leading US companies had already advised their employees abroad to swiftly return to avoid the fee or risk being stranded overseas.

Tamanam, an Austin-based software engineer, began searching for a flight from the city of Vijayawada, as users on the far-right message board 4chan moved to overwhelm reservation systems, in a bid to block Indian visa holders from booking tickets.

One 4chan thread encouraged users to find India-US flights, "initiate the checkout process" but "don't checkout," thereby clogging the system and preventing the visa holders from reaching the United States before the announcement took effect.