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.

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