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The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced an increase effective from July 17 for applicants seeking certain immigration benefits.
The measure affects foreigners who apply for Parole In Place (PIP) or parole in various categories.
This is how the possibility of fee exemption for the Form I-131, Application for Travel Document, Conditions of Parole, and Arrival/Departure Records is eliminated in the categories: initial application for arrival/departure registration for Parole In Place (PIP) for foreigners who are within the United States; and applications to reinstate parole for individuals who previously had a prior period of parole under the PIP program.
In this way, applicants in these categories will need to pay a fee of $630 following the update of Form G-1055, which includes a new list of fees for applications.
The possibility of new fees had already been announced by USCIS on July 11, as part of the immigration policy reforms carried out by the Trump Administration, outlined in its "Great and Beautiful Law".
New prices
After the law was approved, lawyer Wilfredo Allen had warned the audience of CiberCuba that all procedures would become more expensive.
"Things are going to get so expensive!" he warned on his weekly program that airs on Mondays at 11:00 AM Miami time on this platform.
"Let’s be very clear, many people are going to lose their asylum cases. The appeal used to cost 110 dollars. Right now, it’s 900 dollars. If your residency is denied or if you had any benefits from USCIS, the appeal there is 900 dollars," Allen said.
"When you see that appeals range from $110 to $900 each, you realize how expensive things are getting. When you see that the application for residency is now going to be $1,500, you understand that it's a pretty high price. If you're requesting some type of waiver with the residency, the I-601, the application is now $1,050. This is when you have to apply for your residency, but you need to request a waiver for a minor offense, for something that happened," the lawyer clarifies.
"We're talking about you paying $2,550 to apply for your residency. The I-246, which we often use to suspend a deportation, now costs $600. The application for 42A, which is for requesting a formal pardon for criminal offenses when a person is a resident, has risen to $1,500, and to reopen cases is $5,200. If you notice, these are not huge cases in court. I also know that, for example, applying for a parole costs $1,000. That doesn’t mean you will get it; that’s just the cost to apply for that parole: it's $1,000," she emphasized.
Willy Allen further explained that "applying for your first asylum, for work permission, costs $550, and applying for the work permits associated with asylum afterward costs $275. You can see that expenses have increased. And why? The idea is also to make things more difficult for immigrants. Now, in almost everything you're doing, you can request to waive the fees, to not pay the costs. But that will also be very difficult to get approved, because applying to not pay the fee doesn't guarantee that it will be approved."
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