Five Immigration Policy Scoops Everyone Else Missed
From courts pricing out asylum seekers to a federal hiring blitz, here's what the government did while no one was watching.
Good morning, fam. Lots to cover as the week begins, including these five scoops on the immigration beat. Sadly, none of them are good news for migrants. The scoops are listed below with the newsiest first:
1. Starting today, seeking asylum costs money — every single year.
The Justice Department’s immigration courts started charging mandatory fees for asylum cases on June 11 — and there is no waiver. The Executive Office for Immigration Review finalized a rule imposing both an upfront filing fee and a $102 annual fee for every calendar year an asylum case remains pending before the courts or the Board of Immigration Appeals. Not one dollar of it can be waived, even for people who are broke. Cancellation of removal, a form of relief available to long-term U.S. residents without green cards, now costs $1,640 in combined fees. All payments must flow through an online portal.
The legal theory propping this up is thin. Congress has not passed a statute authorizing per-year asylum fees. The administration is doing this through regulation — pricing asylum out of reach one annual invoice at a time.
Attorneys handling pro bono cases are already running the math on clients who may owe multiple years of back fees the moment they try to move a stalled case forward.
2. Trafficking survivors now need a DOJ permission slip to get a green card on time.
Survivors of human trafficking who hold T visas have a path to permanent residence after three years — but Congress wrote in a shortcut: if the underlying trafficking investigation or prosecution is complete, they can apply sooner. On June 16, the Justice Department proposed formalizing who controls access to that shortcut. The answer is DOJ’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, which will now issue — or withhold — the certification letters survivors need to file early. DOJ estimates about 2,000 such requests a year. The comment window closes August 17.
This is a chokepoint, and it is new. Previously, that early-filing pathway existed on paper without a centralized DOJ gatekeeping process attached to it. Now there is one. A trafficking survivor who cannot get that letter — because prosecutors say an investigation isn’t “complete,” or simply because the bureaucracy moves slowly — stays in limbo longer.
Comments are due August 17. Immigration advocates should be in that docket.
3. A new BIA precedent tells people to ask ICE first before asking the court to pause their deportation.
The Board of Immigration Appeals issued a precedent decision on June 12 that, going forward, will generally require people with final removal orders to first request a stay of deportation from ICE before the BIA will consider a stay request filed alongside a motion to reopen or reconsider. The case is Matter of Herrera-Nunez, 29 I&N Dec. 691 (BIA 2026).
The rationale is docket management. The result is a procedural default that redirects the most vulnerable people in the immigration system — those already ordered deported, trying to reopen cases based on new relief — directly toward the enforcement agency trying to remove them. ICE charges a fee for stay requests, though it can be waived. The BIA cited its crushing caseload. That caseload is real. But this rule means that for many people, the courthouse door only opens after ICE says no.