6:48 PM
U.S. Moves to Raise Fees for Deportation Appeals by Nearly Ninefold
Trump administration proposes increasing cost of filing appeals in immigration court system from $110 to $975
wsj.com
Feb. 27, 2020 6:48 pm ET
WASHINGTON—The Justice Department is proposing to dramatically increase the cost of appealing deportation orders, according to a federal regulatory filing Thursday, a move critics say would effectively limit access to the legal system to more affluent immigrants.
The government is proposing to raise the fee required to file appeals in the immigration court system from $110 to $975, a nearly 800% increase. The Justice Department says the move is necessary to keep pace with inflation, as fees haven’t been raised since 1986. Inflation has been roughly 130% since that year.
Immigration advocates say the plan is designed to make fighting deportation prohibitively expensive and say it would raise due-process concerns that could form the basis of lawsuits, should the higher fees take effect.
The increased costs would likely have a particularly significant impact on immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the duration of their deportation cases, along with the more than 60,000 immigrants the Trump administration has required to live in Mexican border cities while their cases move through the court system, a process that typically takes months.
“The proposal is like a poll tax for voters, but here the failure to overcome the barrier isn’t the loss of franchise but banishment from the country,” said Tom Jawetz, the vice president of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning Washington research organization.
The move follows a similar effort by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which handles legal immigration, to nearly double the cost of the citizenship application and attach fees to renewals under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. That rule, which also hasn’t been finalized, would for the first time attach a fee of $50 to applications for asylum, making the U.S. one of just four countries in the world to charge for an asylum application. |
