Will immigration finally increase their filing fees this year,
causing your immigration case to cost more than ever?
Why are they doing so at this time?
And how might this affect your case?
As many of you may be painfully aware, your immigration application
may be taking twice as long as you may have expected it to take.
And you are now waiting longer than ever for your work permit,
your travel documents, and most importantly for your green card
or for your citizenship to finally get approved.
As a result, USCIS has proposed a fee increase in January.
This proposed fee increase rule would raise the filing fee
for applications, and USCIS says that such fee increases will give them
the needed money for hiring more staff and catching up on that backlog.
But of course, they are getting a lot of pushback from immigrants and immigrant
rights agencies across the U.S., receiving more than 4000 negative comments
on their proposed fee rule increase in the past two months alone.
So will they actually raise the fees?
And if they do so,
how much more of a bigger check can you expect to write to the government?
And what can it mean for your case?
I'm going to answer these questions right now.
My name is Moumita Rahman.
I am a practicing immigration law attorney and I am
based in New York working with clients all over the U.S..
If you would like my assistance on your case, call us at 212-248-7907
to schedule a case evaluation.
Many of you have heard these rumors that USCIS is going to raise their filing fees
and you might be in a panic right now wondering if you can manage to cover
these new additional costs with your current immigration case.
But what I'd like to do at
this moment is take you through a journey explaining to you how much time
it might actually take to see these fees go into effect.
Right now, the new USCIS fee increase is just a proposed rule,
and it has been opened up to the public for a commenting period..
And this will end on March 13.
The more comments you make on this rule, the longer it will actually take the U.S.
government to sift through your comments and review them.
Thus, if you have the ability to do so, leave a comment about how you feel
about this rule and how it will affect your livelihood and your case.
Now, if the public commenting period is ending on March 13,
I would estimate that it will probably take between six months
to possibly a year to go through all of these comments
and for the agency to draft their responses.
They will take these comments into effect and draft the final rule.
The final rule must pass a clearance period at the agency level.
Then, once it has passed agency review and gone through any necessary back
and forths with edit, then it will be passed to the White House
and then it will be entered into the Federal Register.
All of this means that most likely this year alone,
the fees will not increase, but at some point they will,
so let's look into how much these proposed
fee increases are and how it might affect your case.
And then we'll talk about why the government is going to do this at all.
The proposed fee increase actually will affect a variety of types of cases.
However, for the purpose of this video, I'm going to talk about the main
three types of cases that I deal with that may affect you.
First thing’s first.
The I-130 petition for alien relative is set currently
at a filing fee cost of $535.
The proposed fee increase would raise this to $820,
which is an increase of $285.
But the majority of people are actually filing their I-130s together
with their application for a green card.
So now if you want to file a green card, keep listening
because this is how much the fees might increase to.
First of all, right now, currently, if you are filing an I-485
and you are eligible for adjustment of status through an immediate relative
petition, your work permit application and your advance parole application fees
are automatically included in this fee of $1,225.
This is the current application
fee for an I-485, and as mentioned already, this includes
the fee for the I-765 EAD application and your I-131 advanced parole.
With the proposed fee increase, the government is now going to start
charging for I-765 EAD applications
and for I-131 advanced parole applications.
If you now want to file your I-485
together with your I-765 and I-131 application,
you will now have to pay a total fee of $2,855.
This is a total increase of more than $1,500,
and it more than doubles the cost of a I-485.
If you don't want to file the I-131 advanced parole application,
your filing fee for the I-485 would go up to $2,190.
So if you don't apply for your travel permit, then you would pay slightly less.
And if you don't file for your I-765 or I-131 at all,
which means that you're essentially not going to request any work
permit authorization or any travel permissions,
then your filing fee would not go up that much.
It would essentially go from $1,225 for the I-485 application
to a grand total of $1,540,
which would roughly be a $315 increase.
Why is the government making all of these fee adjustments and huge fee increases
just for the I-765 work authorization and I-131 travel authorization?
My guess is that they don't want to have to deal with so many applications,
they're overburdened.
And when people file for work permits and travel authorizations,
sometimes there are also a lot of emergency or expedite requests
that are made, which also happen to overburden the agency.
And as a result, in order to discourage people
from asking for these applications and these permissions to work
legally, they're going to make people pay for it even more.
Now, another application that is going to go up by a lot as well is
the I-751 petition to remove conditions on your two year residency card.
Currently, this filing fee, together with the biometrics,
is a grand total of $680.
But with the proposed fee increase, this is scheduled
to go up to $1,195,
which is an increase of $515.
The good news is,
is that the majority of my viewers are also in the position of having to file
for a VAWA I-360 self petition, and your fee will not go up.
And in fact there is talk of increasing certain fee waiver exemptions
for VAWA applicants and for I-751 applicants
requesting a waiver due to extreme cruelty and battery, which is at least
a little bit of a silver lining in this proposed fee rule.
The biggest take away for you right now is this:
If you are eligible to file for a green card or thinking about it,
the time to do so is right now this year before the fees go up.
My prediction is that even once the fee rules go into effect
and the proposed application fees double, in some cases,
it is still going to take the agency at least a year to catch up with this
backlog, hire new staff, and increase its processing times,
or at least go back to a more normal level.
If you want my help navigating your immigration case or your immigration
interview, call us today at 212-248-7907.
I will continue to make my videos and share my knowledge
and my interpretations of the new rules that are going into effect.
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