new fee

WASHINGTON — Late last month, an immigrant seeking asylum in the U.S. came across social media posts urging her to pay a new fee imposed by the Trump administration before Oct. 1, or else risk her case being dismissed.

Paula, a 40-year-old Los Angeles-area immigrant from Mexico, whose full name The Times is withholding because she fears retribution, applied for asylum in 2021 and her case is now on appeal.

But when Paula tried to pay the $100 annual fee, she couldn’t find an option on the immigration court’s website that accepted fees for pending asylum cases. Afraid of deportation — and with just five hours before the payment deadline — she selected the closest approximation she could find, $110 for an appeal filed before July 7.

She knew it was likely incorrect. Still, she felt it was better to pay for something, rather than nothing at all, as a show of good faith. Unable to come up with the money on such short notice, Paula, who works in a warehouse repairing purses, paid the fee with a credit card.

“I hope that money isn’t wasted,” she said.

That remains unclear because of confusion and misinformation surrounding the rollout of a host of new fees or fee increases for a variety of immigration services. The fees are part of the sweeping budget bill President Trump signed into law in July.

Paula was one of thousands of asylum seekers across the country who panicked after seeing messages on social media urging them to pay the new fee before the start of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1.

But government messaging about the fees has sometimes been chaotic and contradictory, immigration attorneys say. Some asylum seekers have received notice about the fees, while others have not. Misinformation surged as immigrants scrambled to figure out whether, and how, to pay.

Advocates worry the confusion serves as a way for immigration officials to dismiss more asylum cases, which would render the applicants deportable.

The fees vary. For those seeking asylum, there is a $100 fee for new applications, as well as a yearly fee of $100 for pending applications. The fee for an initial work permit is $550 and work permit renewals can be as much as $795.

Amy Grenier, associate director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Assn., said that not having a clear way to pay a fee might seem like a small government misstep, but the legal consequences are substantial.

For new asylum applications, she said, some immigration judges set a payment deadline of Sept. 30, even though the Executive Office for Immigration Review only updated the payment portal in the last week of September.

“The lack of coherent guidance and structure to pay the fee only compounded the inefficiency of our immigration courts,” Grenier said. “There are very real consequences for asylum-seekers navigating this completely unnecessary bureaucratic mess.”

Two agencies collect the asylum fees: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), under the Department of Homeland Security, and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), under the Department of Justice, which operates immigration courts.

Both agencies initially released different instructions regarding the fees, and only USCIS has provided an avenue for payment.

The departments of Homeland Security and Justice didn’t respond to a request for comment. The White House deferred to USCIS.

USCIS spokesman Matthew J. Tragesser said the asylum fee is being implemented consistent with the law.

“The real losers in this are the unscrupulous and incompetent immigration attorneys who exploit their clients and bog down the system with baseless asylum claims,” he said.

The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), a national membership organization, sued the Trump administration earlier this month after thousands of members shared their confusion over the new fees, arguing that the federal agencies involved “threaten to deprive asylum seekers of full and fair consideration of their claims.”

The organization also argued the fees shouldn’t apply to people whose cases were pending before Trump signed the budget package into law.

In a U.S. district court filing Monday, Justice Department lawyers defended the fees, saying, “Congress made clear that these new asylum fees were long overdue and necessary to recover the growing costs of adjudicating the millions of pending asylum applications.”

Some of the confusion resulted from contradictory information.

A notice by USCIS in the July 22 Federal Register confused immigrants and legal practitioners alike because of a reference to Sept. 30. Anyone who had applied for asylum as of Oct. 1, 2024, and whose application was still pending by Sept. 30, was instructed to pay a fee. Some thought the notice meant that Sept. 30 was the deadline to pay the yearly asylum fee.

By this month, USCIS clarified on its website that it will “issue personal notices” alerting asylum applicants when their annual fee is due, how to pay it and the consequences for failing to do so.

The agency created a payment portal and began sending out notices Oct. 1, instructing recipients to pay within 30 days.

But many asylum seekers are still waiting to be notified by USCIS, according to ASAP, the advocacy organization. Some have received texts or physical mail telling them to check their USCIS account, while others have resorted to checking their accounts daily.

Meanwhile the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) didn’t add a mechanism for paying the $100 fee for pending asylum cases — the one Paula hoped to pay — until Thursday.

In its Oct. 3 complaint, lawyers for ASAP wrote: “Troublingly, ASAP has received reports that some immigration judges at EOIR are already requiring applicants to have paid the annual asylum fee, and in at least one case even rejected an asylum application and ordered an asylum seeker removed for non-payment of the annual asylum fee, despite the agency providing no way to pay this fee.”

An immigration lawyer in San Diego, who asked not to be named out of fear of retribution, said an immigration judge denied his client’s asylum petition because the client had not paid the new fee, even though there was no way to pay it.

The judge issued an order, which was shared with The Times, that read, “Despite this mandatory requirement, to date the respondents have not filed proof of payment for the annual asylum fee.”

The lawyer called the decision a due process violation. He said he now plans to appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals, though another fee increase under Trump’s spending package raised that cost from $110 to $1,010. He is litigating the case pro bono.

Justice Department lawyers said Monday that EOIR had eliminated the initial inconsistency by revising its position to reflect that of USCIS and will soon send out official notices to applicants, giving them 30 days to make the payment.

“There was no unreasonable delay here in EOIR’s implementation,” the filing said. “…The record shows several steps were required to finalize EOIR’s process, including coordination with USCIS. Regardless, Plaintiff’s request is now moot.”

Immigrants like Paula, who is a member of ASAP, recently got some reassurance. In a court declaration, EOIR Director Daren Margolin wrote that for anyone who made anticipatory or advance payments for the annual asylum fee, “those payments will be applied to the alien’s owed fees, as appropriate.”

Many Los Angeles residents will soon be paying significantly more for trash collection after the City Council voted Tuesday to finalize a dramatic fee increase.

The trash program had become heavily subsidized, to the tune of about $500,000 a day, which officials said was no longer viable given the city’s dire financial straits, which left them scrambling to close a nearly $1-billion budget deficit earlier this year.

Having the cost subsidized by the city for so long contributed to that deficit, according to City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo.

“It should have been corrected a long time ago,” Szabo said. “If we didn’t get this rate increase, the subsidy would have been more than $200 million this year.”

The city hadn’t raised trash pickup fees in 17 years, and a 2016 state law governing organic waste disposal significantly increased operational costs. Large raises for city sanitation workers and rising equipment costs also bumped up expenditures.

Once the new fees go into effect, probably in mid-November, residents of single-family homes or apartments with four units or less will pay $55.95 a month per unit.

That sum is more than double the $24.33 a month that occupants of triplexes and fourplexes had been paying, and a roughly 50% increase on the $36.32 previously paid by residents of single-family homes and duplexes.

Those customers put their waste in black bins for regular trash, blue bins for recycling and green bins for organic waste, which are emptied by city workers once a week. Larger apartment buildings will be unaffected by the changes, because their waste collection is administered through a separate program.

The fees will increase by an additional $10 over the next four years.

By next year, the increased fees will reflect the actual cost of trash pickup and will be on par with or slightly below what residents pay in nearby cities such as Long Beach, Pasadena, Culver City and Glendale.

Still, the new fees will almost certainly engender sticker shock for L.A. residents already contending with skyrocketing insurance premiums, rising rents and eye-popping grocery prices. Rates will be reduced for low-income customers who qualify for the city’s EZ-SAVE or Lifeline programs.

The City Council approved the increase on a 12-2 vote, with Councilmembers Monica Rodriguez and Adrin Nazarian dissenting.

Last week, the council also voted to raise the prices and hours of city parking meters.

“After approving a $2.6-billion Convention Center expansion, the council is asking residents to pay more for basic services like trash collection while delivering less. That doesn’t reflect the priorities of working Angelenos,” Rodriguez said after Tuesday’s vote. “I can’t, in good conscience, support that approach.”

A number of factors catalyzed the city’s financial issues, which exploded into public view during the budget process earlier this year. Los Angeles had taken in weaker than expected tax revenues, paid out more in legal liabilities and adopted large-scale raises for city employees.

When Mayor Karen Bass first presented her budget in the spring, layoffs for more than 1,600 city workers were on the table. She and the City Council were ultimately able to avoid those cuts through a number of cost-saving measures.

Tuesday’s final vote on the trash fees came nearly six months after the council gave preliminary approval to the plan.

The matter was complicated by Proposition 218, a 1996 statewide ballot measure designed to make it harder for local governments to raise taxes and fees. To satisfy the proposition’s requirements, the city had to hold public hearings and give every affected resident the opportunity to weigh in via a notice mailed to their homes before the increase could move forward.

The fee hike legislation still has to be signed by the mayor and formally published by the city clerk. The fee can’t go into effect until 31 days after that, or mid-November at the earliest.

The city budget, however, was calculated under the assumption that the new fees would go into effect Oct. 1. The delay will leave the city on the hook for an extra $500,000 a day.

Because Tuesday’s vote was not unanimous, the ordinance will receive a second reading next week before the council formally approves it and sends it to the mayor — a technicality that will cost the city $3.5 million. The mayor plans to sign it as soon as she receives it, her office said.

The delay to mid-November will cost the city a total of at least $22 million, creating another deficit that will have to be adjusted for down the line.

Still, some residents decried the ballooning fees, with one calling the increase “preposterous.”

“Listen to our cries,” the person, who did not give their name,said in a written public comment. “We can barely keep a roof over our heads — at this time! Los Angeles is falling apart. It is your job to fix it more practically.”

The Historic Highland Park Neighborhood Council also opposed the rate hike, arguing that residents are already facing steep cost-of-living increases and that layering more fees on top of that would be “neither fair nor sustainable.”

The last time the city increased trash fees, back in the summer of 2008, City Controller Kenneth Mejia was a few months out of high school, George W. Bush was in the Oval Office and Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” was topping the Billboard charts.

Amid a global economic downturn, the city was facing widespread cuts, and leaders looked — as they often do — to the price tag of city services to try to balance the budget.

Times staff writers David Zahniser and Dakota Smith contributed to this report.

Legal marijuana businesses in Los Angeles will pay thousands more dollars in renewal fees, the City Council decided Tuesday, bringing fresh financial woes to an already constricting market.

City officials said the fee increases are necessary to make up for declining tax revenue from the marijuana industry, at a time when the city is in dire financial straits.

“This is a difficult but necessary action for the continued functions of [the cannabis department] and to avoid further strain on our General Fund,” City Councilmember Imelda Padilla in a statement.

But some struggling business owners said the increased fees could threaten their survival.

Luis Rivera previously ran three different marijuana delivery businesses in the city, two of which have gone under. He’s now considering shuttering the remaining one, Bonafide Delivery in Sun Valley, due to the fee increases and low profit margins.

“There’s nowhere to pull the money from,” Rivera said. “The fees will be disastrous.”

The new fees, which the council approved unanimously, are expected to bring in about $6 million this year to the city’s Department of Cannabis Regulation, which is required to recoup all its expenses through fees or other charges.

After four straight years where gross receipt taxes from marijuana sales exceeded $100 million, the amount dropped to about $90 million in 2024, according to cannabis department data.

High state and local taxes and the high cost of doing business because of a lack of access to traditional banking and financing, as well as competition with the illegal cannabis market, have contributed to the falling revenue, said Bryan Bergman, an attorney who works with cannabis businesses.

The illegal dispensaries often undercut the prices of legal stores, in part because they do not pay taxes or fees, and have also been hotbeds of crime, according to law enforcement.

“The fee increases are coming at a really bad time for industry folks. And it’s a very significant increase,” Bergman said.

Cannabis products for sale at Bonafide in Sun Valley.

(David Butow/For the Times)

The cannabis department’s budget is $8.6 million for this fiscal year, and it is expected to pay additional $19 million to other parts of city government, such as the city attorney’s office, for their marijuana-related work.

While increasing fees for marijuana businesses, the new ordinance decreases fines for major violations of city rules and regulations. For example, delivering marijuana goods outside of allowable hours will now result in a $23,000 fine, down from $42,000.

The new ordinance also creates a new category of “severe” violation, such as diverting cannabis to unlawful establishments, which would result in a $34,000 fine. Cannabis Department officials said the goal was to avoid excessively heavy fines.

Los Angeles has the nation’s largest municipal commercial cannabis department, overseeing nearly 1,100 licenses for brick-and-mortar dispensaries, delivery businesses and growing operations.

Department officials argued that its fees, which had not gone up since 2020, did not match the cost of operations. Since the department first authorized fees in 2020, its staff has grown from 37 to 63 members. Through collective bargaining agreements, their salaries have also increased 19% since 2020.

The most widespread hit for marijuana businesses will come from renewal fees, which must be paid annually.

A license renewal will jump from $8,486 to $12,617. A temporary approval renewal will go from $4,233 to $6,294, and a record renewal will increase from $1,829 to $2,719.

The new ordinance also contains other fee changes, including an increase in the business diagram modification review fee and a drop in the ownership structure modification review fee.

A Cannabis Department spokesperson said that participants in its social equity program, which provides support to cannabis operators from communities most harmed by the war on drugs, will have some of their increased fees covered by money from a state grant.

The grant will cover about $3.1 million in new fees, said Jason Killeen, the cannabis department’s assistant executive director, during a city council committee meeting Tuesday. More than half of the money will cover the difference between the old renewal fee and the new one for the 317 social equity license holders. The rest of the grant money will go toward new applicants for social equity licenses.

The increased fees come as the city struggles with a budget crisis likely to continue for several years. This year’s budget closes a nearly $1-billion gap through layoffs and other cuts.

The City Council approved an increase in ticket prices for the L.A. Zoo and has taken steps to raise trash fees for roughly 740,000 customers. The city may also raise parking meter fees and extend the meters’ hours of operation.

The Cannabis Department has acknowledged that the new fees will be a hardship for businesses.

“Please understand that this fee study was necessitated by law and is central to DCR’s ability to continue serving this community effectively and equitably,” Executive Director Michelle Garakian wrote in a July news bulletin. “It’s easy to feel like no one at the City cares. But I assure you, DCR does. DCR has to navigate limited resources, competing needs, and make challenging decisions.”