uscis

WASHINGTON — Late last month, an immigrant seeking asylum in the U.S. came across social media posts urging her to pay a new fee imposed by the Trump administration before Oct. 1, or else risk her case being dismissed.

Paula, a 40-year-old Los Angeles-area immigrant from Mexico, whose full name The Times is withholding because she fears retribution, applied for asylum in 2021 and her case is now on appeal.

But when Paula tried to pay the $100 annual fee, she couldn’t find an option on the immigration court’s website that accepted fees for pending asylum cases. Afraid of deportation — and with just five hours before the payment deadline — she selected the closest approximation she could find, $110 for an appeal filed before July 7.

She knew it was likely incorrect. Still, she felt it was better to pay for something, rather than nothing at all, as a show of good faith. Unable to come up with the money on such short notice, Paula, who works in a warehouse repairing purses, paid the fee with a credit card.

“I hope that money isn’t wasted,” she said.

That remains unclear because of confusion and misinformation surrounding the rollout of a host of new fees or fee increases for a variety of immigration services. The fees are part of the sweeping budget bill President Trump signed into law in July.

Paula was one of thousands of asylum seekers across the country who panicked after seeing messages on social media urging them to pay the new fee before the start of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1.

But government messaging about the fees has sometimes been chaotic and contradictory, immigration attorneys say. Some asylum seekers have received notice about the fees, while others have not. Misinformation surged as immigrants scrambled to figure out whether, and how, to pay.

Advocates worry the confusion serves as a way for immigration officials to dismiss more asylum cases, which would render the applicants deportable.

The fees vary. For those seeking asylum, there is a $100 fee for new applications, as well as a yearly fee of $100 for pending applications. The fee for an initial work permit is $550 and work permit renewals can be as much as $795.

Amy Grenier, associate director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Assn., said that not having a clear way to pay a fee might seem like a small government misstep, but the legal consequences are substantial.

For new asylum applications, she said, some immigration judges set a payment deadline of Sept. 30, even though the Executive Office for Immigration Review only updated the payment portal in the last week of September.

“The lack of coherent guidance and structure to pay the fee only compounded the inefficiency of our immigration courts,” Grenier said. “There are very real consequences for asylum-seekers navigating this completely unnecessary bureaucratic mess.”

Two agencies collect the asylum fees: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), under the Department of Homeland Security, and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), under the Department of Justice, which operates immigration courts.

Both agencies initially released different instructions regarding the fees, and only USCIS has provided an avenue for payment.

The departments of Homeland Security and Justice didn’t respond to a request for comment. The White House deferred to USCIS.

USCIS spokesman Matthew J. Tragesser said the asylum fee is being implemented consistent with the law.

“The real losers in this are the unscrupulous and incompetent immigration attorneys who exploit their clients and bog down the system with baseless asylum claims,” he said.

The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), a national membership organization, sued the Trump administration earlier this month after thousands of members shared their confusion over the new fees, arguing that the federal agencies involved “threaten to deprive asylum seekers of full and fair consideration of their claims.”

The organization also argued the fees shouldn’t apply to people whose cases were pending before Trump signed the budget package into law.

In a U.S. district court filing Monday, Justice Department lawyers defended the fees, saying, “Congress made clear that these new asylum fees were long overdue and necessary to recover the growing costs of adjudicating the millions of pending asylum applications.”

Some of the confusion resulted from contradictory information.

A notice by USCIS in the July 22 Federal Register confused immigrants and legal practitioners alike because of a reference to Sept. 30. Anyone who had applied for asylum as of Oct. 1, 2024, and whose application was still pending by Sept. 30, was instructed to pay a fee. Some thought the notice meant that Sept. 30 was the deadline to pay the yearly asylum fee.

By this month, USCIS clarified on its website that it will “issue personal notices” alerting asylum applicants when their annual fee is due, how to pay it and the consequences for failing to do so.

The agency created a payment portal and began sending out notices Oct. 1, instructing recipients to pay within 30 days.

But many asylum seekers are still waiting to be notified by USCIS, according to ASAP, the advocacy organization. Some have received texts or physical mail telling them to check their USCIS account, while others have resorted to checking their accounts daily.

Meanwhile the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) didn’t add a mechanism for paying the $100 fee for pending asylum cases — the one Paula hoped to pay — until Thursday.

In its Oct. 3 complaint, lawyers for ASAP wrote: “Troublingly, ASAP has received reports that some immigration judges at EOIR are already requiring applicants to have paid the annual asylum fee, and in at least one case even rejected an asylum application and ordered an asylum seeker removed for non-payment of the annual asylum fee, despite the agency providing no way to pay this fee.”

An immigration lawyer in San Diego, who asked not to be named out of fear of retribution, said an immigration judge denied his client’s asylum petition because the client had not paid the new fee, even though there was no way to pay it.

The judge issued an order, which was shared with The Times, that read, “Despite this mandatory requirement, to date the respondents have not filed proof of payment for the annual asylum fee.”

The lawyer called the decision a due process violation. He said he now plans to appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals, though another fee increase under Trump’s spending package raised that cost from $110 to $1,010. He is litigating the case pro bono.

Justice Department lawyers said Monday that EOIR had eliminated the initial inconsistency by revising its position to reflect that of USCIS and will soon send out official notices to applicants, giving them 30 days to make the payment.

“There was no unreasonable delay here in EOIR’s implementation,” the filing said. “…The record shows several steps were required to finalize EOIR’s process, including coordination with USCIS. Regardless, Plaintiff’s request is now moot.”

Immigrants like Paula, who is a member of ASAP, recently got some reassurance. In a court declaration, EOIR Director Daren Margolin wrote that for anyone who made anticipatory or advance payments for the annual asylum fee, “those payments will be applied to the alien’s owed fees, as appropriate.”

The T visa, an underutilized lifeline for immigrant survivors of human trafficking, is experiencing a sharp rise in applications, despite increasing processing times and deportation risks.

Also known as T nonimmigrant status, the visa allows people who have experienced severe forms of human trafficking to remain in the country for up to four years if they are helpful to law enforcement in the investigation and prosecution of their trafficker. Approved applicants can work in the U.S., are eligible for certain state and federal benefits, and can apply for a green card after three years on the visa (or earlier if the criminal case is closed).

Julie Dahlstrom, founder and director of the Human Trafficking Clinic at Boston University, said increased awareness of the visa and the courts’ expanding definitions of trafficking may have contributed to the increase, along with mounting barriers to other pathways for immigrant relief.

Congress created the T visa in 2000 as part of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, intending to bolster law enforcement agencies’ capabilities to prosecute human trafficking crimes while offering protections to survivors. The same law also established the U visa, which provides legal status for victims who have suffered substantial abuse as a result of serious crimes including trafficking, domestic violence and sexual assault. U visa applicants must also be willing to assist law enforcement in their investigation of these crimes.

“Many [applicants] are eligible for the U visa as well, but they’re taking now over 20 years for an individual to get access … so I think that has influenced lawyers and survivors, if they are eligible for the T visa … to go ahead and also file T visa applications,” Dahlstrom said. “Especially under the Trump administration, we’ve seen more barriers to asylum access, special immigrant juvenile status access, so I expect we’ll continue to see that move.”

USCIS updated the T visa rules in August 2024 with a process called called bona fide determination that gave survivors earlier access to benefits while their application is pending approval. It also granted them deferred action, which places individuals on a lower priority for removal proceedings.

Erika Gonzalez, training and technical assistance managing attorney from the Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking, explained that although early access to benefits had existed in the federal statute, it was never implemented because applications were processing fast enough to not need it.

“They have updated the [bona fide determination] process to now have a formal process to engage with, and it does parallel with the sharp increases in filing,” Gonzalez said.

As T visa applications rose, so too did approvals. Last year, the number of approvals broke 3,000 for the first time though it still fell short of the 5,000 cap.

Processing times for T visas have also increased, jumping from a median of 5.9 months in 2014 to 19.9 months this fiscal year.

Denial rates for T visas, meanwhile, have fluctuated.

“We were seeing increased denial rates under the prior Trump administration and then improved rates under Biden,” Dahlstrom said.

Denials can leave T visa applicants vulnerable to deportation. In 2018, USCIS began allowing removal proceedings if an application was rejected with a notice to appear (NTA).

According to a 2022 report co-written by Dahlstrom, which obtained USCIS data through Freedom of Information Act litigation, USCIS issued a total of 236 NTAs to denied T visa applicants from 2019 to 2021. President Biden rescinded this policy with a January 2021 executive order, but last February, USCIS published new guidance once more expanding the circumstances where the agency could issue NTAs.

These policies, alongside escalated coordination between law enforcement and other agencies, have heightened fear among survivors applying for the T visa, Dahlstrom explained.

“We are seeing in real time the results of including requirements around law enforcement engagement, especially when there’s greater cooperation with ICE and greater concerns about deportation,” Dahlstrom said. “These programs are being politicized and, in some ways, weaponized if you’re denied and you’re placed in proceedings.”

Since February’s policy update, at least one person has self-deported after Immigration and Customs Enforcement denied her stay despite her pending T visa application.

So far in the fiscal year 2025, USCIS has approved 1,035 T-visas and rejected 693, which surpasses the number rejected in each of the last four years.

“It’s too early to tell what we’re going to see, but if we continue to see these numbers, it’s both going to mean a rise in denials and very few cases adjudicated amidst more and more applications being filed, which is really troubling,” Dahlstrom said. “These are statutorily protected programs, but what they can do is really slow them down, make them ineffective just in the way that they’re processing applications.”