A federal judge in Boston has kept in place a block on one of the harshest consequences of the Trump administration’s new asylum fees: for now, the government cannot reject a pending asylum application, cancel a work permit, or put someone into deportation proceedings for the sole reason that they did not pay the Annual Asylum Fee.
This ruling was issued in early August, but remains widely unknown to the general public.
U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton issued the order on August 5, 2026, in Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts v. USCIS in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. It is not a final decision. It is a temporary measure that holds while the lawsuit continues, and it does not erase the fee itself — U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the immigration courts continue to collect it, and applicants who have received a payment notice still have to pay.
While the order stands, USCIS is barred from doing three things to an asylum applicant solely because the Annual Asylum Fee went unpaid: rejecting or denying a pending application, terminating the person’s work authorization, and referring the person for removal proceedings.
Judge Gorton kept blocking those penalty provisions — part of an Interim Final Rule issued April 20, 2026 — on the ground that denying applications or starting deportations over an unpaid fee changes people’s substantive rights, and therefore should have gone through the formal notice-and-comment rulemaking the law requires, according to analyses of the order by immigration-law firms including BizLegal Services and the national Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, which is among the plaintiffs and which has described the block as nationwide.
That protection targets applicants who were penalized through no fault of their own: people who tried to pay but couldn’t because the payment system wasn’t working for their case, and people who were never clearly told a deadline existed. Until the court intervened, many of them had been left unable to move their cases forward.
The August 5 order was not a clean win. In the same ruling, Judge Gorton lifted an earlier freeze he had placed on a separate administration policy — one that shortens the validity of work permits for Temporary Protected Status holders to one year. That means USCIS may now apply the one-year cap, including to the 540-day automatic extensions that many TPS holders had been relying on, as BizLegal Services reported.
The Annual Asylum Fee is a creation of the law signed in July 2025 and commonly called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It is separate from the $100 fee charged to file an initial asylum application on Form I-589. The annual fee must be paid for each year an asylum case remains open — whether the case is pending before USCIS as an affirmative claim or before the immigration courts, run by the Executive Office for Immigration Review, as a defensive claim. The amount rose to $102, effective February 1, 2026, after an inflation adjustment of about 2.7 percent, according to the immigration firm Grossman Young & Hammond. Before the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, asylum in the United States was free to apply for; the United States had been one of only a handful of countries to charge for asylum at all after the law took effect.
The people most directly helped by the order are those with a pending asylum case — at USCIS or in immigration court — who could not pay the fee because of a system error or because they did not know a deadline had passed. For Haitian and other Caribbean asylum seekers in Massachusetts and across the country, it removes, at least for now, the threat that a missed $105 payment could end a case that has been years in the making. Immigration attorneys have advised applicants who tried and failed to pay to keep records of the attempt, such as screenshots of error messages, in case they later need to show an officer they tried to comply.
What the order does not do is end the fee or the obligation to pay it.
USCIS and the immigration courts are still collecting the Annual Asylum Fee, and the other fees and requirements created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act remain in force unless a court blocks them specifically. Because the ruling is a temporary step in active litigation, it could change as the case proceeds.
The court’s order is a major relief for asylum seekers. Even so, everyone who is able should still pay the Annual Asylum Fee on time. While USCIS cannot deny a case, cancel a work permit, or start deportation proceedings over the unpaid fee, applicants who do not pay may still lose other important benefits that the court’s order does not protect.
https://ctninfo.com/?p=45023&preview=true
https://www.facebook.com/CaribbeanNewsMedia
AI Use Policy:
Some of CTN’s journalists are not native English speakers and draft their work in French or Haitian Creole. We then use AI-assisted translation software to produce the English versions, and traces of machine-generated phrasing may occasionally remain. Every article — in any language — is written, reviewed, and edited by CTN’s staff writers and editors, who remain responsible for its accuracy. CTN also uses AI to convert text into audio.
