In a new proposal, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is seeking to jack up filing fees for people applying to naturalize, from $710 to $1,280—and eliminate fee waivers for people who cannot afford the fee.
Here’s What to Know
The proposal (available here) seeks to increase filing fees applicants must pay to naturalize or to challenge the denial of their naturalization. If implemented, the online filing fee for the N-400 (Application for Naturalization) would increase from $710 to $1,280, an increase of 80 percent. In addition, for those whose naturalization applications are denied and who seek a hearing on the denial, the filling fee to request the hearing (using Form N-336) will increase from $780 to $1,425, an 83% increase. Here is the breakdown of the proposed increases:
| Form | Current Fee* | Proposed Fee* | % Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| N-400 | $710 | $1,280 | +80% |
| N-336 | $780 | $1,425 | +83% |
*Fees increase by $50 when filing a paper form rather than filing online.
Elimination of Nearly All Fee Waivers
Significantly, the government’s proposal seeks to eliminate nearly all fee waivers for low-income applicants, meaning the required minimum price to naturalize will deny naturalization to a large number of applicants, including many intercountry adoptees who cannot afford such a massive fee hike. It also eliminates a reduced fee of $380 for those making less than 400% of the federal poverty guidelines. The only fee waiver the rule does not touch is one related to an applicant’s military service, a waiver that is required by law.
What’s Next
The fee hikes are currently proposed; no effective date has been set to implement them. Under the law related to proposed new regulations, the fee hikes cannot become effective until a public comment period ends in late August and DHS publishes the final rule. Litigation may also delay or prevent implementation of the proposed fee structure, particularly the new rules eliminating fee waivers, which may be on much shakier legal ground than the overall proposed fee hikes. At the earliest, and if litigation does not prevent implementation, the new fees could take effect in late 2026 or early 2027.
Impact on Intercountry Adoptees Without Citizenship
The policy rationale in the proposal rests on two related arguments: (1) that naturalization applicants are legal permanent residents who have lived and worked in the United States with employment authorization for years, giving them more financial stability than other immigration benefit applicants; and (2) that the “choice to naturalize” has been deferrable for this population in a way that other immigration benefits—lawful status, employment authorization—are not.
Neither argument applies directly to intercountry adoptees who have been excluded from citizenship under current law. Many of these adoptees are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, and have been living and working in the United States their entire adult lives—and may have never been they needed to do anything to secure US citizenship. They were not accumulating savings toward naturalization, as the governments rationale suggests. Their lack of US citizenship is a defect created by current law, not a condition they knowingly maintained while saving money to fix it.
As to the rational of choosing to defer naturalization: intercountry adoptees did not indefinitely or casually defer US citizenship—they were denied it, typically without their knowledge. For many, the N-400 is not a choice at all—it is the only available mechanism to correct a legal status that intercountry adoptees did not create and cannot avoid.
Intercountry adoptees who must naturalize through the N-400 are also not a monolithic high-income group. Contrary to popular belief, many were adopted into lower- and middle-income families, and left those families as adults with the same economic distribution as the general population. Some, including many of my current clients, experience financial hardship and qualify for a fee waiver. A prior reduced fee—which DHS is also seeking to eliminate—recognized this reality: that even working adults can face genuine difficulty in paying a $710 filing fee, let alone one that will now increase more than 80 percent to $1,280.
Under this proposed rule, a CCA-excluded adoptee with household income at or below 150% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines—income levels the current rules treat as prima facie unable to pay—would have no mechanism for relief. They would be required to pay a $1,280 fee to correct a citizenship defect that Congress has now failed to remedy since it enacted the CCA’s discriminatory age-based framework a generation ago.
