SCOOP: ICE Moves to Hike Deportation Stay Fee by 387 Percent

The agency hasn’t touched the fee since 1989. Now it wants to charge $755 to people with final removal orders — many of them sick, broke, or both.

WASHINGTON — While Washington’s immigration lawyers have been buried in the USCIS fee overhaul that’s dominated the trade press, the federal agency that actually carries out deportations has been quietly moving to nearly quintuple its own fee — the one a person pays when they’re begging ICE not to put them on a plane.

ICE published a notice of proposed rulemaking on May 7 to raise the filing fee for Form I-246 — the application used to request a discretionary stay of deportation or removal — from $155 to $755. That’s a $600 jump. A 387 percent increase. And the first adjustment to that fee since George H.W. Bush was in his first year in office.

The rule is explicit about its ideological home. It ties the hike directly to President Trump’s executive order on “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders,” framing the fee increase as a cost-shift from “taxpayers” to “those receiving the direct services” — in this case, people who are already under final removal orders and, in many instances, asking for more time in the country because they are seriously ill, or because their child is a U.S. citizen, or because they have nowhere safe to go.

ICE projects the higher fee would extract roughly $2.25 million more per year from applicants, based on an estimated 3,745 fee-paying I-246 filings annually.

The agency acknowledges it cannot fully model how many people will simply stop filing because they can’t afford it. The rule notes that fee waivers remain available — but that ICE retains sole discretion over whether to grant them.

The public comment window closes July 6, 2026. Docket: ICEB-2020-0005 on Regulations.gov.

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