When the federal government introduced a new $100 annual asylum fee in 2025, it created an immediate crisis for asylum seekers across the country and the organizations supporting them. At Oasis, the moment became visceral on Monday, October 13, 2025, when our team suddenly found ourselves looking at a floor covered in hundreds of fee notices for our pending clients. We had to notify more than 1,000 clients of this new update, and the confusion was enormous.
As guidance from USCIS evolved, we kept updating our community, offered to help cover costs, and tried to stay ahead of the chaos. Then came the referral deadline – a rule stating that anyone who did not pay after May 29, 2026, would lose the ability to have their asylum case heard at the asylum office, have their work permit terminated immediately, and face an increased chance of deportation. The stakes could not have been higher. We needed to be absolutely certain that every single client who needed to had paid before that date. And we were deeply concerned about how difficult it would be to track and verify which clients had already paid and which hadn’t.
Then we faced another wave of anxiety: After May 29th, other clients would have rolling deadlines to pay an annual maintenance fee depending on when they had originally applied for asylum. We had no guarantee that USCIS would continue to notify people of these deadlines, or whether asylum seekers would be left to track this on their own.
During this time, we began talking with an Oasis volunteer—a software engineer—about the enormous stress this was creating for our staff and clients. They listened closely, understood how unnecessarily confusing the system was making this, and came to the conclusion that there must be a way to automate our efforts. And so we built a tool, collaboratively.
The volunteer developed a system that allows organizations to easily check whether a client's fee is due, replacing hours of manual status checks with a simple, centralized search. For Leanne, our Director of Operations, the impact was immediate.
"This tool started saving me hours a day leading up to the May 29th deadline," she said. "And once I realized how much time and stress it was saving us, it was exciting to think about how much it could help other organizations in the community."
For asylum seekers, the implications were even more personal. The idea of logging in week after week to manually check a status, and knowing that missing a deadline could derail an entire asylum case and terminate a work permit, was causing deep panic.
That is why we are now developing version 2.0 in collaboration with the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), a longtime partner and the largest collective of asylum seekers in the United States. ASAP uses technology to serve more than one million immigrants in the U.S., providing in-depth resources, a remote legal help desk, and breaking news alerts to help members navigate the U.S. asylum system. Their reach and their deep trust within asylum seeking communities make them a powerful partner to help expand this tool.
Version 2.0 will go a step further than our current tool: Rather than requiring organizations or asylum seekers to remember to log on weekly to check their case status, the tool will send direct notifications when a fee deadline is approaching. Just a simple alert, and the peace of mind that comes with it, is something that asylum seekers (navigating an already difficult process) deserve.
At Oasis, we believe in supporting our community with every resource we have — legal, emotional, and technological. We are proud of what this tool represents, and we are committed to sharing it with other immigration providers who are working just as hard to protect their own clients.
If your organization is interested in learning more about this tool, please reach out to us at admin@oasislegalservices.org.