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Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Trump put a new fee on asylum seekers. Many say they don’t know how to pay.

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The Trump administration imposed a new annual $100 fee on asylum seekers earlier this summer.

But more than three months later, immigrants and their attorneys say they can’t figure out whether they owe the money or how to pay the fee.

The confusion is the latest example of how the Trump administration’s efforts to curb legal pathways for immigrants have trapped people in a bureaucratic maze, according to immigration attorneys and advocates who are struggling to advise their clients. The fear is that these new fees create a way for the Trump administration to deny asylum claims and quickly deport some immigrants.

“It just feels like people are being cornered from every angle, and the lack of clarity just causes that much more fear and intimidation,” said Robin Nice, an immigration attorney in Boston. “It’s hard to know if it’s weaponized incompetence in how they’re rolling it out, or if it’s straight up malicious … but it’s really hard to advise clients.”

The fees, which are new, were part of the GOP’s domestic policy and tax law President Donald Trump signed on July 4, but the administration’s rollout has been plagued by mishaps: The two agencies collecting the fees initially released different instructions, and only one has offered a vehicle to pay the annual fee.

Payment notices to asylum seekers have been sporadic, and misinformation has run rampant on social media.

Some asylum seekers who have opted to pay the immigration courts $100 say there’s no way to know whether that’s the correct way to pay or whether the federal government will ask them to pay again, according to court filings, immigration attorneys and asylum seekers who spoke with POLITICO.

“I don’t think chaos and confusion is part of the point. The fee amounts themselves are designed to be prohibitive while being just under the line of impossible,” said an administration official, granted anonymity to discuss internal thinking.

The new fees are just one component of the administration’s sweeping effort to permanently alter the immigration system. They come after the White House announced plans last month to overhaul H-1B visas, a move that briefly spurred panic inside corporations. The One Big Beautiful Bill also included a number of other new fees and fee increases for immigration benefits, including an initial $550 fee for asylum work permit applications.

The administration has also revoked Temporary Protected Status, a program that allows immigrants from countries facing humanitarian crises to remain in the U.S. and work legally, and terminated parole for millions of immigrants.

The new $100 fee for every year an asylum application is pending, which is in addition to a new $100 application fee, is in part, designed to deter mass migration and limit access to legal pathways Republicans say have long been abused and have contributed to a massive backlog in the immigration courts. It’s a similar rationale the administration gave for curtailing TPS and reforming the H-1B program.

The Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. The White House deferred to the agencies implementing the policy. But in a court filing late Monday in federal district court, DOJ lawyers defended the fees and said the agencies are moving to finalize the policy’s implementation.

“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,” the lawyers wrote.

The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, a membership organization that serves asylum seekers in the U.S., sued the Trump administration this month after hearing from thousands of members confused by the new asylum policy. The organization filed a motion for a preliminary injunction, arguing that the fees should not apply to those who had cases pending before the president signed the bill into law and that it’s a misread of the legislation.

“We don’t want the annual asylum fee to be used to wrongfully dismiss peoples’ asylum cases, especially since asylum seekers may not know about this fee or have no mechanism to pay it,” said Conchita Cruz, co-founder and co-executive director at ASAP.

Alba, an ASAP member, applied for asylum with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2024 after coming to the United States from Honduras. She has not received official notice from the agency about her fee, and as of Monday, is still unable to submit the $100, she said. POLITICO agreed to only use her first name because she fears retribution.

“We have had so much fear, so much anxiety,” said Alba, adding that she is worried she won’t have the cash on hand to pay when the government gives her official notice. “And then you have to be ready to pay at whatever moment [the government] tells you that you have to pay.”

Asylum seekers’ cases are handled by either USCIS or the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Depending on the circumstances, immigrants sometimes begin their asylum process with one agency, and are later asked to apply with the other — adding another challenge to the Trump administration’s implementation.

USCIS’ initial instructions said the first payments would not be due until Sept. 30, at the earliest, for those who filed applications before October 2024. The agency began sending notices to asylum seekers on Oct. 1, instructing recipients to pay the fee within 30 days. USCIS launched a portal to pay soon after, but a number of asylum seekers are still awaiting official notification and instructions for how to pay.

EOIR, for its part, announced the first annual fees would affect those who applied for asylum a year or more prior to July 5, but it has yet to provide a mechanism to submit those payments. The website only has a place for immigrants to submit the $100 initial asylum fee.

Justice Department lawyers on Monday said that while EOIR and USCIS initially released differing instructions, EOIR has revised its position to reflect USCIS’ timeline and is “taking steps to finalize” its payment process. The agency, like USCIS, will send official notices to applicants once its payment mechanism is finalized, and asylum seekers will then have 30 days from the date of the notice 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.”

The government also argued that the law intended the fees to be retroactive, and said the plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate that its members will suffer irreparable harm — requesting that the court deny the request for a preliminary injunction.

But ASAP has received reports that some immigration judges at EOIR have already required applicants to have paid the application fee, and in one case, rejected an asylum application and ordered the person to be deported for non-payment, according to the organization’s Oct. 3 filing.

Other asylum seekers with pending cases before the courts, out of desperation, have submitted $100 toward the initial application fee to EOIR, leaving them unsure if the money will ultimately count as their annual fee — or if the government will soon request $100 more.

“A good number of clients have against our advice, frankly, have paid that initial fee with the idea that it should be applied for the annual fee,” Nice, the Boston attorney, said. “I’m skeptical that it’ll be interpreted that way.”

Jorge, another ASAP member whose last name is being withheld for fear of retribution, came to the U.S. in 2023 from Colombia and has an asylum case before EOIR. On Oct. 1, he saw posts on social media about the money being due and has repeatedly tried to pay through the USCIS portal. The website has crashed and denied his payments. He tried again on Monday, but the website says his fee isn’t due.

“I am willing to pay, and have been trying to pay, but it is necessary that the government give clear and precise instructions, because what I don’t want to do is pay $100 and then be told that I didn’t pay the right $100 or to lose those $100,” he said. “I’m so worried that they’re going to close my case and deport me if I don’t pay.”

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