Good morning and welcome back to Unite Immigrant Families. Rosemary Vega. I'm an immigration attorney here in Houston, Texas. know it's been some time my last podcast, but I'm back. Um, I felt like it was time that I recorded a podcast, especially right now because new fees that are going to be implemented April 1st. with the USCIS. Um, and some of these new fees are good. Some of them are bad. So, well, not bad, but they're an increase. And some of them are actually going down. So I don't see it as, as a bad thing, you know, but it is a fee change, right? today I have Mariana and she's my legal assistant. Hi Mariana. How are you today?

Hi, Rosemary. Good morning. I'm, I'm great. Thanks for asking. And thank you for having me. It is a pleasure for me to be here today.

Great. So we are going to discuss the fee changes with, uh, USCIS. And I wanted, I wanted you specifically on today's podcast because You do a lot of the forms and you have a lot of interaction with the clients. I wanted you to talk about how the fee increase or the fee change is going to affect some of your work because immigration is trying to change their system and they're trying to do a lot of stuff online, a lot of their applications online, they've, they're trying to incentivize by giving a little bit of discount on their fees to try to do some of these applications online. And some of these applications can be done online, and some of them might not be a good idea to be done online. Um, and that's why I wanted you explain, help me explain why some of these applications probably would not be a good idea to be done. Um, and also some of the difficulties we have had in doing the applications online with the client. Overall, I mean, I've done some of the applications online historically without a problem, recently been a few hiccups and that might just be USCIS changing their system and that might have been some of the hiccups. Um, let's go through some of the applications really quick because. I see that. Well, let's talk about why there's going to be an increase. You know, USCIS, they're usually self funded. So a lot of people don't know that, you know, they get very small percentage of their money. from, uh, from, you know, the government. Other than that, they're usually self funded. Their, their pays comes from the application fees. their salaries and whatnot. So, and they haven't had a pay increase in a long time, right? So it's kind of important to have that. Um, so that is really important, right? Um, USCIS us that it's about four or 5%. 95 percent of their funding comes from the appropriations of bill. And means the rest, 95 percent of their funding comes from filing fees. So that is huge, right? So they're raising fees because they need to Kind of work on the backlog, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

an I 130 is taking over a year. You know, the waivers, the I 601A waivers, They're taking four years. So our clients were saying they're, they're constantly calling us and what's the status? What's the status?

Oh, it's take, we're still pending. It's still pending, right? So this is why they're working on the backlog. They are, they really want to work on the backlog and they've told AILA, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, they've told us. That they are wanting to hire more employees to work on this backlog, um, hire more staff. Um, so that's important.

Sure. For doing so, they have to increase the fees. And that's the explanation of what they are doing, what they're doing now with the fees.

Absolutely. know, and especially because, because there is a lot more asylum applications and refugee support, so they need to hire more staff, right? So, I mean, we all know I've have asylum applications that have been pending almost nine, 10 years. So this is it. It is crucial. is...