The Price of Citizenship Just Went Up — By $570

A new federal proposal would raise naturalization fees by 75% and strip fee waivers from hundreds of thousands of low-income immigrants. The government isn't hiding its reasoning.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration wants to charge legal immigrants $570 more to become Americans — and for the first time in the modern era, it’s saying out loud that it doesn’t think encouraging citizenship is the government’s job anymore.

The Department of Homeland Security published a proposed rule Monday that would raise the filing fee for Form N-400 — the application for U.S. naturalization — from $760 to $1,330 for paper filers, and from $710 to $1,280 for those filing online. The fee to appeal a denied citizenship application would jump from $830 to $1,475. The rule was published in the Federal Register on June 22 and opens a 60-day public comment period through August 24.

Those numbers alone would reshape the economics of naturalization for hundreds of thousands of people. But the fine print is where the real damage is.

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Who Loses the Most

Right now, immigrants with limited income have two options to reduce the cost of naturalization: a full fee waiver, available to applicants facing financial hardship or receiving certain public benefits, and a reduced $380 filing fee for households earning up to 400% of the federal poverty line. Under the proposed rule, both disappear. The only carveout left standing is a longstanding statutory exemption for active and former military service members.

The administration’s rationale, laid out in the proposed rule, doesn’t hedge: DHS is adopting what it calls a “full-cost, beneficiary-pays” model, meaning applicants must now cover the full processing cost of their own citizenship application — including expanded background checks, interviews, and what the agency describes as ongoing vetting enhancements required by recent executive orders.

“Although DHS has historically limited the fees for naturalization-related applications to fulfill previous administrations’ priorities of encouraging naturalization, DHS no longer believes naturalization benefit requests should get lower fees at the potential expense of other immigration benefits,” the agency wrote in its proposal.

That sentence is worth reading twice. The federal government — for generations a formal proponent of naturalization as a civic and economic good — is now on record saying it is no longer in the business of making citizenship accessible.

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The Knock-On Effect

USCIS, which is funded almost entirely by application fees rather than congressional appropriations, acknowledged in its own proposal that higher fees could cause some eligible permanent residents to delay or abandon their citizenship applications altogether — and instead keep renewing their green cards indefinitely.

For low-income immigrants already navigating a system that has grown more hostile to legal status at every level, this is not an abstract possibility. It is the likely outcome. A family of four living at the federal poverty line does not keep $1,330 in a drawer for a filing fee.

Former senior USCIS official Doug Rand, who served during the Biden administration, did not soften his assessment. “The only credible explanation for jacking up citizenship fees in isolation is that Trump 2.0 is in a hurry to create even more undue barriers for legal immigrants,” Rand told CBS News.

Immigration attorney Rosanna Berardi, based in Buffalo, N.Y., was more precise about the pattern. “When you simultaneously raise fees, eliminate waivers, and add new vetting layers like neighborhood checks and expanded ‘good moral character’ scrutiny, you are not streamlining a system,” Berardi told ABC News. “You are building walls inside it.”

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What Happens Next

The proposed rule is not yet final. USCIS will accept public comments through August 24 at regulations.gov under docket number USCIS-2026-0265. The agency must review that feedback before issuing a final rule, and current fees — including waivers and the reduced $380 option — remain in effect throughout this process.

But the direction of travel is clear. This proposed rule lands alongside a May USCIS policy memo that made adjustment of status harder to obtain domestically, a State Department pause on immigrant visa processing for nationals of 75 countries, and the $70 billion Secure America Act signed into law June 10. Each piece, taken alone, is a policy change. Taken together, they form a blueprint: tighten legal immigration at every seam, and make the people already here pay more for the privilege of staying.

The comment period closes August 24. The current fees are still in effect. File now, or document why you can’t.

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The administration just put in writing that it no longer believes making citizenship affordable is a government priority. That's not spin — it's their language. If that sentence makes you angry, this newsroom is where your money goes. Become a paid subscriber, and send this to one person navigating the naturalization process right now.