🍁 Happy Monday! Back to our roots—today's newsletter is a crisp 320 words, a 1.5-min read.

💡Why the special edition?  While I tend to focus on Lawfully’s employment-based USCIS case processing data in this newsletter, we actually have a larger dataset of family-based and asylum-based cases.

I’d like to share more of that intel here for the many practitioners in the family and asylum immigration space.

So this will be the first version of Asylum Intel—but stay tuned for more to come!

1 big thing: USCIS is now requesting the $100 annual asylum fee for I-589s pending for over 1 year

As of October 1, USCIS has begun requesting that asylum seekers pay a new $100 annual asylum fee.

This is one of several new fees created by the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’—which was signed into law earlier this summer.

For the first time, the USCIS case status tool is displaying a message notifying certain asylum seekers that they must pay this fee — even if they applied for asylum before the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' was signed into law.

At Lawfully, we’ve identified 933 unique I-589 receipt numbers that had a status update requesting the new fee be paid. The first appeared on October 5.

For context, about 3,920 unique I-589 cases have received any kind of status update so far this month, according to our data. That means roughly 24% of all cases we’ve tracked this month were prompted to pay the fee.

It’s still unclear how USCIS is sequencing these notifications or applying the 30-day payment window—but the rollout is clearly underway.

If you’re tracking asylum filings and want to see these updates in real-time across your firm’s or clients’ cases, shoot me a DM on LinkedIn or email me.

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📩 That’s it for this week! I want to hear your feedback and questions, so drop me a note anytime at [email protected].

See you next week!