California Officials Denounce Proposal to Hike U.S. Citizenship Fees

California elected officials and immigration advocates are denouncing a Trump administration proposal that would hike the application fees to become a U.S. citizen by 83%, while also eliminating many fee waivers that low-income immigrants rely on.

Under the proposed rule by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the total cost of renewing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals would increase from $495 to $765, while naturalization application fees would rise from $640 to $1,170.

During the agency's last price hike in 2016, under the Obama administration, the naturalization fee increased by $45.

“Citizenship and the ability to obtain the immigration status for which you are eligible should not depend on the size of your bank account,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and other mayors wrote in a Dec. 18 letter to the agency urging the agency to withdraw the proposal.

Under the current proposal, USCIS would no longer offer fee waivers for people applying for naturalization, work employment authorization, permanent residency and other benefits. The agency would also get rid of the discounted rate for people petitioning to become U.S. citizens.

In an unprecedented move, USCIS would also charge some asylum-seekers $50 to request the protections, and $490 to apply for a first-time work permit while their cases are pending. The only three other countries that charge asylum-seekers a fee to consider their applications are Iran, Fiji and Australia.

USCIS said the changes were necessary to recover full operating costs. The agency estimates current fees would leave it underfunded by $1.3 billion per year.

Unlike most federal agencies that are funded through taxpayer money, USCIS relies on immigrant application fees to pay for most of its operations and services.

“This proposed adjustment in fees ensures more applicants cover the true cost of their applications and minimizes subsidies from an already over-extended system,” a USCIS spokesperson said in a statement.

Currently, USCIS offers to waive the citizenship application fee for extremely low-income immigrants. In 2016, the agency began cutting the naturalization fee in half for immigrants with slightly higher incomes.

USCIS issued a separate rule in October that made it harder for low-income immigrants to qualify for fee waivers. This would have prevented about 200,000 people in California from becoming citizens, critics say.

On Dec. 13, a federal judge in San Francisco blocked the administration from continuing to implement the changes, which stopped allowing immigrants to use means-tested benefits like Medi-Cal as a way to qualify for the fee waiver.

Opponents say the proposed rule is another attempt by the Trump administration to restrict legal immigration, with potentially lasting consequences for future U.S. elections since naturalization enables immigrants to vote.

The impact could be huge in California, which has more than 2 million adults eligible to naturalize — about a quarter of the total population nationwide eligible to become citizens.

The proposed fee hikes combined with further restrictions to fee exemptions would negatively impact most of the people served by the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, said Catherine Seitz, the. nonprofit's legal director. The group helped more than 1,800 immigrants naturalize over the last year through citizenship workshops and legal aid.

“Many people won’t be able to apply for naturalization. They’ll have to put it off because they have to pay their rent first or feed their family first,” said Seitz. “It's "frustrating they are going to raise fees at a time when they are just not providing the services that they should be providing.”

A big complaint is the growing wait times for all kinds of immigration applications nationwide. Applicants for naturalization must now wait an average of 10 months for USCIS to process their petitions, compared to six months in 2015.

The agency has hired additional staff and expanded its facilities to keep up with an "extraordinary demand" for services, said USCIS spokeswoman Jessica Collins. In 2019, the agency naturalized about 833,000 new citizens, the most in more than a decade.

But in recent years, the agency has also increased security screenings and other bureaucratic hurdles for applicants, said Diego Iniguez-Lopez, policy and campaigns manager for the National Partnership for New Americans, which opposes the proposed rule. Those changes — such as increasing the length of the naturalization form to 20 pages — have added work for agency staffers and contributed to a backlog of more than 700,000 naturalization applications, he said.

“All of these policies are slowing down the process for USCIS to do its mission, which is adjudicate immigration applications,” said Iniguez-Lopez. Now, they're trying to put the new expenditures “on the backs of low-income immigrants, which we think is fundamentally unfair and getting away from what USCIS should be doing.”

People who become U.S. citizens are more likely to have higher incomes and own their homes, compared to immigrants who don’t get citizenship, according to researchers.

The public comment period on USCIS’s proposal ended Dec. 30. Advocates don’t expect a final rule until April or May because the federal government must review more than 29,000 comments submitted.

Seitz believes any changes would not significantly impact the next presidential election because of its timing and the extended processing times for naturalization applications. But she said the Trump administration’s proposal could reduce the number of naturalized voters in future elections.

The letter from California mayors to the agency isn't the only time elected officials have spoken out against the proposal.

In November, a group of nearly 50 mayors and several members of Congress from California and other states urged USCIS to withdraw its proposal.

U.S. Senator Kamala Harris and five other democratic senators also raised their own concerns in December about some of the proposal's provisions, such as the transfer of more than $112 million from USCIS fees to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Under U.S. immigration law, funds from USCIS fees are exclusively for processing immigration applications and naturalization services, not immigration enforcement, the senators wrote in a letter rebuking the agency.