The Annual Asylum Fee Is Still Owed. The Penalties Are On Hold.

If you have an asylum application pending, USCIS is going to send you a letter, or already has. The letter will demand that you pay a $102 Annual Asylum Fee. The letter will give you thirty days. If you do not pay in thirty days, the rule on the books says USCIS rejects your asylum application, ends your work permit, and can refer you for removal. A federal court has paused USCIS from carrying out those penalties while that case is decided. The fee itself is not paused. Pay it.

That is not a threat. That is the new rule that took effect May 29, 2026.

You may have heard, on Spanish-language Facebook, in your church group, or from a friend, that a court blocked this fee. That was true. It is no longer true. A federal court in Maryland did stay the fee on October 30, 2025. The same court lifted that stay on February 2, 2026. The fee is back. USCIS has been collecting since February. The notices you are getting in the mail are real, they are lawful as of today, and ignoring them costs you the asylum case you have been working on for years.

This post explains what the fee is, who has to pay, what the consequences of not paying actually look like, the narrow group of people who do not have to pay, and the federal-court angles that may still be available. It is calendar-bound. If you got a notice, you have thirty days from the date of the notice. Do not wait for the mail. Notices do not always arrive, and the thirty days run from the day the notice is sent, not the day you read it. Check your USCIS online account about once a week, and if your case is in immigration court check the EOIR payment portal.

What is the Annual Asylum Fee

The Annual Asylum Fee, or AAF, is a new $102 charge that asylum applicants must pay to USCIS every year while their asylum application is pending. It was created by H.R.1, the budget reconciliation bill that President Trump signed on July 4, 2025. The fee is codified in section 100009 of Pub. L. 119-21 and at 8 U.S.C. § 1808. The base amount is $100. USCIS set it at $102 for fiscal year 2026, which runs through September 30, 2026. The law requires a new inflation adjustment every October 1, and the government has already fixed the fiscal year 2027 increase at 3.4 percent, so the amount goes up on October 1, 2026. Pay the exact amount shown on your notice.

The fee is annual. Neither the statute nor the regulation says what happens when a spouse or children are listed on the same I-589, so do not assume one payment covers your whole family. Pay the exact amount your notice states. For an I-589 filed on or after October 1, 2024, the fee comes due on the 365-day anniversary of filing and on every anniversary after that while the case is pending. For an application that was already pending through all of fiscal year 2025, it comes due on September 30 each year. So if you filed your I-589 in November 2024, your first anniversary was November 2025, and you should expect a notice in your mail.

The lawsuit was real. The order is gone.

We are repeating this because the misinformation is causing real harm.

On October 3, 2025, the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, or ASAP, filed a lawsuit under the Administrative Procedure Act in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland challenging the fee. It was not a class action, so no one became a class member through it. The case was captioned ASAP v. USCIS at the time and is now Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project v. EOIR, No. 1:25-cv-03299 (D. Md.). On October 30, 2025, the district court partially granted ASAP’s motion for a preliminary injunction. The court temporarily stayed the USCIS Federal Register Notice and the EOIR memo that implemented the fee. For three months, USCIS could not collect.

On February 2, 2026, the same court granted the government’s motion to lift the stay and denied ASAP’s motion for a preliminary injunction. The fee was reinstated. USCIS has been sending notices and collecting since February. That Maryland case is still being litigated, and a ruling on the government’s motion to dismiss and ASAP’s motion for summary judgment could come at any time. As of September 17, 2026, no court order blocks the Annual Asylum Fee itself. The fee is owed and you should pay it. A separate case did something narrower. On August 5, 2026, Judge Nathaniel Gorton of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts stayed USCIS from carrying out the penalties for nonpayment. Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts v. USCIS, No. 1:26-cv-13038 (D. Mass.), Dkt. 53. That order is still in force today, it binds USCIS and not the immigration courts, and it lasts only until that court rules on the merits. The bill stands even while the punishment is paused.

That means that the notices arriving in the mail right now are valid notices. The thirty-day clock that runs from the date of the notice is a real clock. Anyone who tells you the fee itself has been blocked is repeating news from October that has been overtaken by events. And anyone who tells you USCIS is terminating work permits over this right now is a step ahead of where the law is today.

Why May 29, 2026 matters

On April 29, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security published an Interim Final Rule in the Federal Register at 91 Fed. Reg. 22952. The rule, FR Doc 2026-08333, codifies the Annual Asylum Fee, the consequences of nonpayment, and several other H.R.1 fee provisions in the Code of Federal Regulations. The rule’s effective date is May 29, 2026.

May 29 is not a single, universal deadline for every asylum applicant. The thirty-day clock runs from the date of each applicant’s personal USCIS notice. May 29 is the date the consequences of nonpayment become operative for everyone whose thirty-day window has run.

The rule is an Interim Final Rule, which means it took effect without going through the standard notice-and-comment process. The comment period closed on June 29, 2026. USCIS then issued a correction on July 21, 2026 that put back a deadline the April rule had dropped, so USCIS again has thirty days to decide a first work-permit application once the 180-day mark has passed. The rule is potentially subject to Administrative Procedure Act challenges, both for bypassing notice and comment under 5 U.S.C. § 553 and as arbitrary and capricious under 5 U.S.C. § 706. We will say more about that at the end of this post. For now, treat the May 29 effective date as real and act accordingly.

What happens if you do not pay

USCIS has been explicit, both in the IFR and in a public alert titled "DHS Announces Consequences for Unpaid Annual Asylum Fees, Unveils New H.R. 1 Requirements." Here is what that rule says. Read it knowing that the August 5, 2026 order has paused USCIS from doing any of it. This is the exposure that comes back if the pause ends, which is why the fee still has to be paid.

• Under the rule, USCIS rejects your pending I-589 asylum application. Not denies. Rejects. The distinction matters and we explain it below.
• USCIS denies your pending I-765 application for an Employment Authorization Document, also known as a work permit, that was based on the asylum application.
• If you already have an approved EAD card in your wallet, USCIS will terminate your work authorization. The card itself stops being valid. This is one of the most surprising and most important consequences. Many people assume that an existing card stays valid until its expiration date. That is not the rule under the new regulation. What actually triggers the termination is the rejection or denial of the asylum application, not the missed payment by itself, and the dates differ depending on whether USCIS, an immigration judge, or the Board of Immigration Appeals acts. Today USCIS is not carrying any of that out, because of the August 5, 2026 order.
• If you do not have any other lawful immigration status, the rule lets USCIS issue you a Notice to Appear and refer you to immigration court for removal proceedings. That referral is also covered by the August 5, 2026 order.

The trap inside the trap is the difference between rejection and denial. A rejected I-589 generally does not toll the one-year asylum filing deadline. The one-year deadline under 8 U.S.C. § 1158(a)(2)(B) requires that you file for asylum within one year of your last entry into the United States, with limited exceptions for changed or extraordinary circumstances. If your asylum application is rejected for nonpayment, and you try to refile later, the government may take the position that your refiled application is barred because more than one year has passed since your entry. People who have been here for years, whose asylum applications have been pending for years, can be functionally locked out of asylum entirely if their application is rejected for nonpayment of a $102 fee. That is the buried risk.

Who has to pay, and who does not

Anyone who has a pending Form I-589 with USCIS or the immigration court that has been pending for at least 365 days is subject to the fee. If you have been on the asylum docket for years, you are subject to the fee. If you filed in 2024 or 2025 and your case is pending, your first anniversary is approaching or has already passed.

There is one significant carve-out. On February 5, 2026, USCIS paused collection of five H.R.1 fees, including the Annual Asylum Fee and the asylum application fee, for members of the Ms. L. Settlement Class and their Qualifying Additional Family Members. Other H.R.1 fees are not on that list, so do not skip a fee just because you are in the class. That carve-out comes from Ms. L. v. ICE, No. 18-cv-00428 (S.D. Cal.).

The Ms. L. class covers families who were apprehended together at the United States border with Mexico and separated by the federal government between January 20, 2017 and January 20, 2021. The settlement was finally approved on December 11, 2023. If you were separated from your child or your parent at the border during that window, or you are a Qualifying Additional Family Member of someone who was, you may not have to pay. Notices issued before February 5, 2026 to class members and Qualifying Additional Family Members were rescinded.

If you think you might be in the Ms. L. class, do not pay before getting that question answered. The Department of Justice maintains a Legal Services for Ms. L. Class page through the Executive Office for Immigration Review. The website together.gov has additional information. The exemption is not automatic. USCIS requires you to register at together.gov or juntos.gov and to be confirmed by the Family Reunification Task Force Research Committee. If you have not registered and been confirmed, pay the fee while you pursue the confirmation. If you are uncertain, call us, call ASAP, or call CLINIC.

How to pay if you do have to pay

Where you pay depends on where your case is. If your I-589 is with USCIS, USCIS only takes the fee online, through the USCIS payment portal at my.uscis.gov, in the Annual Asylum Fee section. If your case is in immigration court or on appeal at the Board of Immigration Appeals, you do not pay through my.uscis.gov. You pay through the EOIR payment portal at epay.eoir.justice.gov, and you file proof of payment with the court. This matters more than any other line in this post, because the August 5, 2026 order binds USCIS and does not bind the immigration courts. An immigration judge can still act on your case if you miss the judge’s deadline. The portal accepts credit cards, debit cards, and ACH bank transfers. It does not accept checks or money orders. You will need your A-number and your I-589 receipt number.

You should pay before your thirty days run. We recommend paying within the first two weeks of receiving the notice. The portal can have outages, processing can be delayed, and you do not want a technical problem to result in a rejection of your asylum case.

Paying does not waive your right to challenge the fee. If a future court order invalidates the AAF or the IFR, practitioners generally take the position that paid fees should be refunded to people who paid under protest. USCIS has said the opposite, that it will not refund annual asylum fees already paid, so treat a refund as an argument to be made and not as money you can count on. Pay first, fight second. Do not roll the dice on a court ruling that may not come.

If your work permit was just terminated

If you missed a notice, paid late, or only learned about the fee from your employer, you may be worried that your EAD card is already invalid. Because of the August 5, 2026 order, USCIS is not currently terminating asylum-based work permits over an unpaid Annual Asylum Fee. Here is what to do.

First, log into your USCIS online account and check the status of your case. Look for any AAF notices that came through the portal. If a notice exists and the thirty days have run, document the date the notice was issued and the date you saw it. Pay the fee immediately even if you are past the thirty days. Late payment may not save the case, but it will preserve some arguments for reinstatement.

Second, do not quit your job over this without checking first. No asylum-based work permit is being terminated over an unpaid Annual Asylum Fee while the August 5, 2026 order holds, so a card that has not expired is very likely still good. Confirm it before you do anything. Check your USCIS online account, look at the expiration date on the card, and if you want independent confirmation ask about your SAVE or E-Verify status. If you get actual written notice that your work authorization has been terminated, then stop working on that card, because working without authorization creates separate immigration problems and can hurt the asylum claim itself. Talk to a lawyer before you tell an employer anything.

Third, consider a motion to reopen if your asylum case has been rejected. The motion has to argue, at minimum, that the rejection was procedurally improper, that you have paid or will immediately pay, and that the equities favor reinstatement. We have started filing these. The case law is being made right now.

Where federal court may still be relevant

The April 29, 2026 Interim Final Rule is fresh. It bypassed standard notice-and-comment rulemaking, citing the good-cause exception in 5 U.S.C. § 553(b)(B). Whether that good-cause invocation will hold up under judicial scrutiny is an open question. Several theories of attack are circulating among practitioners and we expect to see them tested.

• APA challenge to the IFR for failure to follow notice-and-comment procedures and for arbitrary and capricious decision-making.
• Procedural due process challenge to the consequence stack — terminating an existing EAD, rejecting a pending asylum application, and triggering removal — without a meaningful pre-deprivation hearing on hardship or ability to pay.
• Eighth Amendment Excessive Fines Clause challenge in cases where the AAF, combined with new H.R.1 filing fees and EAD fees, has the effect of a punitive financial barrier to asylum. The question in such a case is whether the fee is punitive rather than simply a charge for a service.
• As-applied due process challenges where USCIS notice procedures fail — for example, where notice was sent to a stale address through no fault of the applicant, where ESL applicants were not provided language access, or where the thirty-day clock was triggered without actual receipt of notice.

One of them has now partly worked. ASAP’s preliminary injunction in Maryland was denied, but on August 5, 2026 the Massachusetts court found that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the argument that the nonpayment-consequence parts of the April rule were adopted without the procedure the law requires, and it stayed those consequences on that basis. That is a temporary order and not a final ruling, and the same judge rejected the same argument as to the work-permit processing changes. The comment period closed on June 29, 2026, and litigation in this space is moving fast. If you have a particularly strong hardship case, or if your EAD was terminated under circumstances that suggest a notice failure, federal court may be a real avenue. That is the kind of case Bardavid Law handles. It is not the kind of case a volume firm has the bandwidth to litigate.

Bottom line

Pay the fee unless you are confident you fall within the Ms. L. carve-out. Do not assume the October 2025 Maryland stay is still in place, because it is not, and do not assume the August 2026 Massachusetts stay excuses you from paying, because it does not. Check your online account about once a week instead of waiting for mail. Open every USCIS letter the day it arrives. Pay within the first two weeks of receiving any AAF notice. If your EAD has already been terminated or your asylum application has already been rejected, call us today. The reinstatement and federal-court paths exist, but they get harder with every day that passes.

You have spent years building this case. Do not lose it over a fee this size.

If you got a notice and do not know what to do, contact Bardavid Law. We will tell you the truth about your options, including the truth that you may simply need to pay. We will save the federal-court conversation for the cases that actually call for it.