Disney initially 'got away with it' because they kept the whole thing at an arms length by outsourcing to Cognizant. "Oh that's what you did, hire H1B? Yeah that wasn't us... We just outsourced to Cognizant so you should ask them about what's going on".
Super shady, but it was a fleeting attempt at plausible deniability on behalf of Disney execs.
These were two separate instances of layoffs. The grandparent link is not related to yours (except that both stories involve Disney, and both involve layoffs).