The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” now before the Senate takes the current preoccupation with making every governmental relationship transactional to an immoral extreme. It puts a $1,000 price tag on the right to seek asylum — the first time the United States would require someone to pay for this human right.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights holds that “everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” U.S. law incorporates that right, stating that “any alien … irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum.” Neither makes this right contingent on being able to pay.
Bear in mind that asylum seekers in the United States do not have the right to court-appointed attorneys. That means the system already profoundly disadvantages indigent asylum seekers — they can’t afford a lawyer, often don’t speak English and have no road map for navigating arcane immigration law.
The new law would make asylum even more inaccessible for a poor person, in effect, creating two classes of those seeking refuge here. Those wealthy enough to pay $1,000 up front would have their protection claims heard; those unable to pay would be shunted back to face persecution and the problems that drove them from their home countries to begin with.
If this part of the bill isn’t modified before its final passage, Congress will have piled on to the obstacles the Trump administration has already put in place to block the right to seek asylum. On Inauguration Day, President Trump proclaimed an invasion of the United States by “millions of aliens” and “suspend[ed] the physical entry of any alien engaged in the invasion across the southern border.” Until the president decides the “invasion” is over, the order explicitly denies the right of any person to seek asylum if it would permit their continued presence in the United States.
Since Jan. 20, asylum seekers trying to enter the United States at the southwestern border have been turned away and, in some cases, loaded onto military planes and flown to third countries — Panama, for example — without any opportunity to make asylum claims.
“I asked for asylum repeatedly. I really tried,” Artemis Ghasemzadeh, a 27-year-old Christian convert from Iran, told Human Rights Watch after being sent to Panama. “Nobody listened to me …. Then an immigration officer told me President Trump had ended asylum, so they were going to deport us.”
On top of the basic fee for asylum seekers, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” would also require an asylum seeker to pay a fee of “not less than $550” every six months to be permitted to work in the U.S. while their claim is pending. The bill would also impose an additional $100 fee for every year an asylum application remains pending in the heavily backlogged system, punishing the person fleeing persecution for the government’s failure to provide sufficient immigration judges.
Children are not spared. For the privilege of sponsoring an unaccompanied migrant child, the bill would require the sponsor, often a relative who steps forward to care for the child, to pay a $3,500 fee. Congressional priorities for spending on unaccompanied children who arrive at our borders show a distinct lack of compassion: The bill directs that a $20-million appropriation for U.S. Customs and Border Protection “shall only be used to conduct an examination of such unaccompanied alien child for gang-related tattoos and other gang-related markings.”
Add to these barriers the complete shutdown of the U.S. refugee resettlement program, except for white South Africans; the termination of “humanitarian parole” for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans; the end of temporary protected status programs that have provided protection to people coming from countries of widespread conflict, and the travel ban that bars entry from some of the world’s top refugee-producing countries, including Afghanistan, Myanmar, Iran and Sudan.
In the meantime, Trump hypes the idea of selling $5-million “gold cards” for super rich foreigners who want to buy U.S. permanent residence. When asked who might be interested, Trump replied, “I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people.”
The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” includes $45 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention capacity (by my calculations, that would more than triple capacity). It also specifies $14.4 billion for ICE transportation and removal operations, $46.5 billion for the border wall and $858 million to pay bonuses to ICE officials.
With all the money Congress is prepared to spend, it’s a wonder the bill didn’t add a few dollars for sanding down the inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty and re-chiseling it to say, “Give me your rich and well-rested … yearning to breathe free.”
Bill Frelick is refugee rights director at Human Rights Watch and the author of the report “‘Nobody Cared, Nobody Listened’: The US Expulsion of Third-Country Nationals to Panama.”
