Tucked into the Trump administration’s signature domestic policy legislation are massive increases to legal fees that make it more expensive to apply for legal residency, claim asylum and challenge deportation orders.
Former immigration judges say those fees create steep barriers to anyone coming into the country who tries to play by the rules.
“It’s horrible. It’s yet another barrier to justice, another impediment to having your full day in court,” said Jennifer Peyton, who was the assistant chief immigration judge in Chicago until she was fired on July 3 (immigration court falls under the Justice Department and is not an independent judiciary).
Those seeking Temporary Protected Status — reserved for people who can’t safely be in their country due to war or natural disasters — must now pay a fee of $500, up tenfold from $50. Even then, there’s no guarantee the Trump administration will abide by past government precedent and forgo targeted deportations of those with pending applications. The White House’s attempts to yank Afghanistan from the list was only held back when an appellate court earlier this month blocked it. (However, the government website no longer lists Afghanistan as a country designated for Temporary Protected Status.)
Previously, asylum seekers who flee countries in turmoil, government persecution or gang violence could seek refugee status for free. Now, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services charges a $100 asylum application fee, plus another $100 every year while that request is pending.
“Fees required to be paid under this section shall not be waived or reduced,” the final bill text reads.
And until last month, it cost $1,440 for aspiring Americans to apply for a green card. The bill appeared to raise that fee by just $60 — but it allows Attorney General Pam Bondi to set it even higher. When the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, or EOIR, published the revised numbers, the fee on the government I-485 form was now pegged at $2,940.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has fired immigration judges across the country — even while increased police raids have flooded that administrative court system — straining an already backlogged system. The shift in government priorities is even more pronounced when considering the reallocation of funding: Congress poured $170 billion into deportation efforts by law enforcement and Trump has ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to triple in size with 20,000 more agents, incentivizing recruits with $50,000 recruitment bonuses and student loan forgiveness.
Migrants and asylum seekers are often coming into the U.S. with little in the way of funds, making the fees a true barrier to obtaining legal status.
What’s more, ICE agents are frequently arresting migrants who show up for their hearings at immigration courthouses, targeting the very people attempting to work within the system — contradicting Trump’s insistence that his law enforcement agents are focusing on criminals.
The one-two punch of surging arrests and higher fees also means that jailed migrants are essentially locked out of any kind of a legal pathway, the former judges told NOTUS.
Migrants held behind bars are severely limited in their ability to access funds or submit forms unless they have friends or family on the outside. Jailed migrants typically wouldn’t have access to internet-connected computers — USCIS now says that the $100 annual asylum fee “must be paid online.” And migrants are usually kept in county jails where inmates are rarely given the ability to earn a salary through penal labor, which is already obscenely low, often at less than a dollar per hour.
“Those jailed don’t have access to earn funds, because stamping license plates or building furniture is only at long-term detention facilities. The mission statement of EOIR is to fairly and expeditiously adjudicate. This takes everything out of that. It’s crazy,” Peyton said.
George Pappas was an immigration judge in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, until he was fired last week. He says his supervising judge explicitly ordered him to dismiss ongoing cases — in order to give federal agents waiting outside his courtroom the legal pretext to make an arrest. He said the sudden spike in government processing fees should be viewed in the greater context of shifting rules and increasingly militaristic law enforcement raids.
“Obviously, it’s punitive. You’re just penalizing a vulnerable population. You’re going to have less justice and more enforcement,” Pappas told NOTUS.
Pappas pointed to several agency memos showing how judges are under closer scrutiny and are repeatedly warned against being too soft on migrants. One memo, dated June 27, warns judges that any perceived “bias and hostility toward either party may be subject to corrective or disciplinary action.” The directive came just as government immigration prosecutors began to refuse identifying themselves in court, an act of defiance that would be unthinkable in any of the nation’s state and federal courtrooms — but one that was tacitly accepted by immigration judges.
“Now every judge is looking over their shoulder at other judges. This system masquerades as due process and fair hearings but it’s about fear, intimidation, and it’s another way to flush out judges,” Pappas said.
This isn’t the first time Trump has tried to jack up immigration processing fees. During his first administration, the DOJ proposed raising the cost of appealing an immigration judge’s decision from $110 to $975 — raising prices for the first time since 1986. U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta ultimately issued a nationwide injunction blocking that from going into effect on Trump’s last day in office, ruling that the EOIR “acted arbitrarily and capriciously by disregarding the final rule’s impact on legal service providers and their capacity to provide legal services to persons subject to removal proceedings.”
But the most recent landmark decision from the conservative majority on the Supreme Court yanked away universal injunction power from trial judges. The DOJ wasted little time to issue the new rules after the passing of the mega spending bill. Congress raised the appeal fee to $900 or “such amount as the Attorney General may establish, by rule,” and the DOJ set the new toll at $1,010. And under the new law, that fee is now pegged to inflation, which ensures that it will increase every year going forward.
“It sets up a perverse incentive for judges, because that’s going to stop a lot of people who won’t appeal. You’ll see incentive there to deny applications,” said Ryan R. Wood, who spent several years as a lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security and later became an assistant chief immigration judge in Minnesota.