This sponsored column is by Law Office of James Montana PLLC. All questions about it should be directed to James Montana, Esq., Janice Chen, Esq., and Victoria Khaydar, Esq., practicing attorneys at The Law Office of James Montana PLLC, an immigration-focused law firm located in Falls Church, Virginia. The legal information given here is general in nature. If you want legal advice, contact us for an appointment.
If you filed an asylum application with USCIS more than a year ago, and that application is still pending, you may recently have received a notice from USCIS directing you to pay something called the Annual Asylum Fee. Or you may not have. That, as we will explain, is part of the problem.
The Annual Asylum Fee was created by H.R. 1 – the reconciliation bill enacted in July 2025, sometimes known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act – which requires asylum applicants to pay a fee for every year that their asylum application remains pending. The length of time an application remains pending is, of course, determined almost entirely by the government, not by the applicant. This feature of the law has not escaped the notice of asylum seekers or their lawyers.
The rollout has been, to put it charitably, iterative. USCIS launched a payment page in October 2025 and began sending notices. A federal court in Maryland paused the notices a few weeks later. That pause was lifted in February 2026. In April 2026, the Department of Homeland Security published an Interim Final Rule, effective May 29, 2026, which spelled out the consequences of failing to pay on time: rejection of the asylum application, termination of the applicant’s work permit, and potential referral to removal proceedings. Meanwhile, the notices themselves have proven unreliable. Many applicants report never receiving one, and some only learned that they had owed the fee when the USCIS website informed them that their payment period had expired.
The Litigation: No Penalties – For Now
In July 2026, a coalition of organizations representing asylum seekers and TPS holders sued USCIS in federal court in Massachusetts in Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts v. USCIS. On July 21, 2026, the court issued an administrative stay, and on August 5, 2026, it extended that relief while the case proceeds. Under the court’s orders, USCIS may not:
- reject an asylum application because the applicant failed to pay the Annual Asylum Fee;
- terminate an applicant’s work authorization for failure to pay; or
- begin removal proceedings based solely on failure to pay.
The stakes were not small. According to the plaintiffs, USCIS had been prepared to reject 227,186 pending asylum applications for nonpayment. In August, USCIS also reopened expired payment windows, so applicants who were previously told their deadline had passed may now be able to pay.
But note what the court did not do. The order expressly allows USCIS to keep collecting the fee, and USCIS’s position is that anyone who receives a notice must pay it according to its instructions.
Our Advice: Pay the Fee
We advise our clients to pay. Yes, the federal courts have – for now – prevented USCIS from punishing applicants who don’t. But “for now” is emphatically not forever. Stays can be lifted, narrowed, or reversed. We do not trust the government to follow up quickly or competently with applicants when the litigation changes course. The fee is about $100 – $102, with the latest inflation adjustment, $105 soon. Pay it as soon as it comes due.
Here is the procedure to follow to pay the fee.
- Check whether your fee is due at the USCIS Annual Asylum Fee page: my.uscis.gov/accounts/annual-asylum-fee/start/overview. Do this even if you never received a notice. Given the track record, we suggest checking every week or two.
- Have your A-number and your asylum receipt number ready. Use the receipt number for your Form I-589 asylum application – not the receipt for your work permit application or any other applications you may have filed. Asylum applications filed locally tend to start with the three letters “ZAR” or “LGL.”
- The amount is $102, rising to $105 on October 16, 2026 – this Friday. If your notice shows the older amount, pay the amount the payment page displays.
- One fee per application, not per person. If your spouse and children are included as dependents on your application, you pay one fee. If they filed their own applications, each application owes its own fee.
- There is no fee waiver.
- Expect to pay again next year if your case is still pending. The fee is annual, and it is (in theory) adjusted for inflation.
The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project maintains an excellent, regularly updated guide to the fee, including step-by-step instructions and explanations of the various error messages the payment page may display.
If You Are in Immigration Court, Different Rules Apply
Everything above concerns asylum applications pending with USCIS. If your asylum case is before an immigration judge or the Board of Immigration Appeals, totally separate procedures apply. The immigration courts are part of the Department of Justice, not USCIS. They charge the fee through their own payment system, they impose it through written orders from the judge (sometimes with very short deadlines), and they expect proof of payment to be filed with the court and served on ICE. The Massachusetts court’s order does not affect the immigration courts, and failing to pay a fee ordered by an immigration judge can cost you your asylum claim. If you are in immigration court, speak with a lawyer about the fee – ideally before your deadline, not after. Keep the immigration court system advised of any changes of address, even if you move after a removal order has been issued and your case is on appeal. Otherwise, you’ll miss the fee notice, miss the payment window, and perhaps have your case denied by default.
The purpose of this article is practical, not moral. But we do want to take a moment to point out the absurdity of this procedure. The government is demanding that asylum seekers make an annual payment, via a nontransparent system which is available only online, solely in English. When you pay, you don’t get a receipt for weeks, if ever. You pay as long as your case is pending, and you cannot control how long your case is pending. If you don’t understand what is happening, or you forget to update your address with an unresponsive bureaucracy, or you simply miss a deadline, the government claims the right to deport you and your entire family. It’s worth thinking about that for a moment.
Readers are, as always, invited to ask questions, and we will do our best to respond.
