The immigration attorney Liudmila Marcelo has explained in statements to CiberCuba the difficulties they are encountering in paying the new fees implemented by the tax law signed by President Donald Trump on July 4, which sets the annual fee for asylum seekers with open cases at $100.
"In this first week, the asylum requests we were submitting to the court were rejected due to lack of payment. We had to insist; we called the courts. A colleague of mine called, wrote, and they told her, 'What we’re going to do is accept it. When we find a way to make the payment, we will send you a 'call-up date,' that is, a document, a 'scheduling order' for you to pay at the appropriate time.' As for my cases, I insisted, but I didn’t receive a response. The second time I followed up, they realized there was no way to pay the new fees. I looked for all possible ways to make the payments, but it didn’t work out," the lawyer stated.
That means the million-dollar question is: how do you pay for that? "They really introduced these fees, raised some prices, but as such, the payment method isn't implemented. With the motions to reopen and appeals, a payment method was already planned. In those cases, there is a way to do it. It's right there, within the Court's website. But with asylum applications, it wasn’t implemented, and then they issued this regulation without having established a payment method, and we were going crazy. There were deadlines. You had to submit the asylum application because, let's say, the day after tomorrow is the last day, and you find yourself with a rejection because you haven’t paid. And how do I pay? By the time you send a check and provide evidence that you paid, the time to submit the asylum application passes, and the client is left unprotected," she pointed out.
In short, Liudmila Marcelo sends a message of reassurance to asylum seekers: there is no need to panic because the method to pay the annual fee of 100 dollars, as stipulated by the new rates, has not yet been implemented.
"And if the asylum has already been submitted, because what I have also been uploading these days are amendments to asylum cases, for people who already applied for their asylum when they had to, and now what I’m uploading are amendments, they are not charging for those amendments, meaning that anyone who submitted their asylum application has done so without having to pay; that person can also be at ease," she clarified.
The President of the United States, Donald Trump, enacted his "Great and Beautiful Law" on July 4th, Independence Day, which was approved a day earlier in Congress with a tight vote of 218 in favor and 214 against. For immigrants, this is bad news because the new tax regulations increase the costs of immigration procedures.
Starting July 4, the application for humanitarian parole costs $1,000, the TPS fee increases from $50 to $500; asylum is $100 per year while the case is open; the work permit for TPS, asylum, and parole costs $550; appeals go up from $110 to $900, and the application for residency rises from $1,440 to $1,500, among others.
Filed under:
