This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Over the weekend, asylum seekers in New York were flooded with messages — some from their lawyers — telling them to pay a $100 fee to the Trump administration by Tuesday or risk deportation.
Moussa, an asylum seeker from Mali who lives in Manhattan, received a WhatsApp message from his lawyer’s office on Saturday instructing him to pay the fee by Tuesday. “Failure to pay and meet this deadline can and will result in Dismissal of your claim of relief and possible order of removal,” the message said.
Moussa didn’t have $100 on hand — “I just paid my rent, so I don’t have any money right now,” he said — so he found work on Sunday at a small demolition site to try to collect it. Still, he wasn’t sure whether he would be able to pull the funds together in time. (New York Focus has changed some names in this article to protect people with active court proceedings.)
“If it’s true now and I don’t pay, that’s a problem. But if it’s fake, I’m just throwing this money away,” Moussa said in French, speaking on the phone from the demolition site. “I’m scared.”
President Donald Trump’s sweeping July budget package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, levied new fees on asylum seekers across the country. It mandated that federal immigration agencies collect a one-time $100 fee for new asylum applications and an annual $100 fee for pending applications, including applications submitted since October 1, 2024 that remain pending as of September 30, 2025.
But it’s unclear when and how applicants should pay that annual fee, leaving many panicking amid a surge of rumors and misinformation.
Deborah Lee, lead attorney at the Legal Aid Society’s Immigration Law Unit, said the lack of clarity has sparked confusion among immigration attorneys and thousands of asylum seekers.
The payment portal “currently only seems to allow for paying the initial asylum application fee” and doesn’t account for situations such as applicants who are appealing asylum decisions, Lee wrote in an email.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association said that some immigration judges had set September 30 as a deadline to pay the fee for newapplications — even though it only became possible to pay that fee last week. “For close to three months there was no way to pay this required fee, with wild differences in how individual immigration judges addressed this issue,” a spokesperson for the association said in a statement.
There is still no way to pay the annual fee for pending applications, the spokesperson said, “so many practitioners are still concerned about applications being dismissed if there is no mechanism set up to pay that fee . … There are very real consequences for asylum seekers navigating this completely unnecessary bureaucratic mess.”
Fallou, a Senegalese asylum seeker who lives in Manhattan, received a WhatsApp message on Saturday, forwarded by a friend, titled “URGENT.”
“If you don’t pay before the 30th, you risk losing your case,” the message said in French.
Fallou attempted to pay the fee online, but the payment portal crashed when he tried to enter his information, he said. On the advice of his lawyer, he sent the money to his friend over Zelle, and the friend paid for him under the “Initial Fee” option — even though Fallou was not submitting a new application.
“Everyone is saying, ‘Only three days left,’ and I have no idea what to do,” Fallou said. “People say that the site isn’t even finished. We hear a lot of things. In the end, you don’t know what’s true or not.”
Some lawyers have advised people with pending asylum applications not to pay the fee until more information becomes available.
Lee, the Legal Aid attorney, said she’d heard reports of notaries “using this confusion to spread widespread fear amongst noncitizens and charge them exorbitant amounts to purportedly help them pay these fees.”
After spending nearly two years in New York, recent arrivals are accustomed to scams from people posing as immigration lawyers and potential employers, and Fallou had considered the possibility that the message he received was one of them.
“I thought, this is too vague,” said Fallou. “But then I thought that maybe the president is doing this on purpose to dismiss a lot of cases.”
Modou, a Senegalese asylum seeker living in Brooklyn, received a similar message. He said he couldn’t tell if it was a scam or not — but that he plans to pay the fee, because he can’t afford to risk it. He has a hearing in October and is worried that his judge will dismiss his case if he’s late on the payment, he said.
The threat of case dismissal is particularly acute for asylum seekers in New York, where federal immigration enforcement agencies have focused their efforts to arrest people leaving mandatory court hearings.
你知道吗？非公民办理驾照时的这个错误可能会导致选民欺诈
Online groups of recent arrivals are currently flooded with questions about the $100 fees. Many Senegalese immigrants, for instance, get their information about shifting immigration policies from Senegalese TikTok influencers; those accounts, and others from West Africa, have posted videos explaining to followers how to pay the $100 fee.
New York Focus contacted the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, us Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the Department of Justice. Only one agency responded, and none provided information on what asylum seekers with pending applications should do.
Akash Mehta contributed reporting.
