Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our office here in St. Louis, Missouri. Last week, USCIS announced that they were going to increase the filing fees for most immigration applications. The fees range in how much they go up, but every case is going to become more expensive come October 2, 2020.
So every couple of years USCIS raises its rates. There's been a lot of discussion about USCIS's rates lately because the agency is claiming that it's broke. And we all know that the main reason that the agency is "broke" is because the Trump administration and the nuts running USCIS, these right wing fundamentalist, anti-immigrant folks who are running the agency are driving it into the ground. And they're taking a lot of the money and using it for enforcement. It's not what the application fees are supposed to be used for, but that's what they've been doing. Now they're asking Congress for more money because they've run the agencies so poorly, but as part of that and against that backdrop, we now see them raising fees.
So the point of this video is just to let you know that the fees are increasing. They're not terribly high. I looked over a lot of the main forms that we use today, and you're talking maybe 50 or a hundred dollars. And of course, that's a lot of money for people. They also are going to start charging extra for work cards and travel cards. They really don't like immigrants and they really don't like legal immigration. So they're doing everything they can to screw people. So if you have an application that you want to get on file before October 2nd, you probably should because that's when the fees will go up. So historically we'll start hearing from people those last two weeks of September, and they'll want to scramble to get their cases ready, but you should really do that sooner rather than later.
If your questions about the fee increases, give us a call at (314) 961-8200. You can email us at [email protected]. Be sure to join us in our Facebook group that's called An Immigrant Home. We release a lot of our information there first. And if you want to subscribe to our YouTube channel, you'll get updates whenever we make videos, just like this one. Thanks a lot and have a great day.
