Five People in One House, and the Fee We Got Wrong

Think of one house. Not a real one — a composite, built out of what named people told named reporters this month. In it there are five people, and this week each of them has a different problem. None of the five is waiting on the same thing. None of them can solve another’s.

This is not a prediction about you. It is a way of sorting a week in which the news arrived in five unrelated pieces, so that you can find the piece that is actually yours and skip the rest.

One of those pieces is a correction. This page told its readers something about money and immigration court last week that was wrong in the direction that costs people the most, and Thursday is when it would have started costing them. That section is below, and it is the one to read if anything of yours is due in court.

1. The person whose last pill is gone

At a panel in Sarasota last week, Pastor Diems Duverlus, who runs the United Neighborhood Community Center, described the people coming to him now: “Some of them, they have to take medication every day, and after the last pill drop, they can’t get anything else.”

Marlene Berthelot, of the St. Petersburg humanitarian group Haitian Mission Par La Foi, told the same room about a mother too frightened to take a feverish child to a doctor. “That was enough for me there,” Berthelot said. “I said, ‘OK, we’re going to take the child to the doctor.’”

WUSF’s Nancy Guan reported both. What the two accounts have in common is not a policy. It is that in each one, the thing standing between a person and their medicine was that they would not leave the house, and what fixed it was a second adult who would.

So that is the step, and it costs nothing: decide today who the second adult is. Who else in your life could collect a prescription, sit in a waiting room, or drive a child to a doctor if you decided you could not. Write that person’s name and number on paper and put it where the rest of your household can find it. Tell them you have done it. This is the same piece of paper the family plan tools are built around, and it is worth more filled in badly today than perfectly next month.

2. The child who is a citizen

Duverlus and Berthelot both said the families they see are usually mixed-status: a parent without papers, a child born here. Some of those parents, they said, have become too afraid to take their U.S.-citizen children to school.

A U.S.-citizen child cannot be deported. That sentence is true and it is worth holding on to. But it is not the whole answer, because a parent who is removed may have to decide, very quickly and under pressure, whether the child goes too — and that is a decision nobody should be making in an airport.

Human Rights Watch, reporting on Sept. 28 about a Haitian father deported in August, quoted a pediatrician who treats immigrant families and who now counsels parents to name in advance the person who could make their child’s medical decisions. Her reason was blunt: many of the families she sees have no second adult who could take the child at all.

Naming that person is free, it is legal, and it is reversible. It is the single most useful hour a household in this situation can spend. Start at tools and checklists, and if you can reach a lawyer, ask them to put it in writing properly — free legal help lists where to try.

3. The adult whose permit ended

Anthony Baffo is a vice president at Plymouth Harbor, a senior living community in Sarasota. About 40 percent of his workforce, he said, is foreign-born. He told the panel that a few employees have had to leave because they lost work authorization, and that an employer cannot keep them on without breaking the law.

That is an employer saying plainly what employers usually will not. It is also the reason for the one habit this page keeps repeating: whatever your employer hands you — a letter, a notice, a form, a termination — keep your own dated copy of it before you give anything back. Not for the office. For a lawyer, and for you, six months from now, when what the paper said is the only record of what happened.

The same panel noted that people who lost status also lost their driver’s licenses. If that is you, the thing not to do is drive anyway and hope. What to do when a work permit expires is the page for the rest of it.

4. The person with something due at immigration court — and our correction

New immigration-court filing fees take effect on Thursday, Oct. 1. The Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review published the amounts on Sept. 29: the asylum application itself stays at $100, the annual asylum fee goes from $102 to $105, the waiver of grounds of inadmissibility goes from $1,070 to $1,100, and the application to adjust status goes from $1,540 to $1,590. These are only the portion the court itself collects; the notice says the total on the court’s payment portal is that fee plus a separate Homeland Security fee, so the real bill is higher than any of those numbers.

Here is the correction. On Sept. 28 and Sept. 29, this page ran a section headed “A fee waiver is still allowed,” and told readers to ask whether they could request one. That was wrong for the two asylum fees, and wrong in the worst direction — it invited someone to send a waiver request instead of money and expect the filing to survive.

The notice’s actual words are that the court rejects a filing that arrives without the correct fee “or request for an applicable fee waiver.” Applicable is the word that carries the whole thing. This page has now read the statutes underneath those fees. The one behind the asylum application fee and the one behind the annual asylum fee each end with a subsection headed “No fee waiver,” and each says the same sentence: the fees “shall not be waived or reduced.” The statute behind the adjust-status and inadmissibility-waiver fees carries no such bar.

This page is not going to tell you which of those your own filing is. That is exactly the question for a lawyer, and it is worth the phone call today rather than Friday. Ask two things: whether anything of yours falls before or after Thursday, and what the exact total is — fee plus fee, not the headline number.

One blank the government’s notice left is answered by the statute itself: the annual asylum fee is owed “for each calendar year that an alien’s application for asylum remains pending.” If your case has been pending for years, that is a recurring bill, not a one-off.

And because these are published government amounts: anyone quoting you a different price for the same filing is quoting their own fee, not the court’s. Nobody can sell you a faster filing, and nobody can sell you a waiver of a fee the law says cannot be waived. Find free legal help.

5. The person afraid of a country that is not theirs

On Tuesday the Supreme Court put on hold the order that had required notice before someone is deported to a country that is not their own. Those removals can resume while the case is argued in December. There is no opinion and the order gives no reasons.

Read the limit before the fear: this is about where, not whether. It does not touch removal to Haiti, which is a person’s own country, and the countries named in the challengers’ own filing are South Sudan, Eswatini and Libya. Haiti appears nowhere in it.

But if ICE ever names a country that is not yours, the step is immediate and it is yours to take: say out loud that you are afraid to be sent there, ask for that in writing, keep your own copy, and get a lawyer the same day. Know your rights · Find someone detained.

What did not change this week

The U.N. Security Council voted on Tuesday to extend the anti-gang force in Haiti to March 2027. It is a real decision about a real force, and it changed nothing about anyone’s immigration case — no case reopened, no flight cancelled, nothing to apply for, and no fee anyone may charge you because of it.

TPS for Haiti and for Syria is terminated, effective July 27, 2026, and the work permits expired the same day. That has not moved, and nothing in this week’s news moved it.

And the sentence this page will keep putting last, because it is the one people get wrong about themselves: losing TPS is not a judge ordering you personally to leave. That is true for most of the people reading this. If a judge has already ordered your removal, that order did not go away — and that, ahead of fees and forms and everything else in this article, is the thing to put in front of a lawyer this week.