For months, the Trump administration has deterred immigrants from attending their hearings through fear tactics and late notices that give people little time to prepare. Now the administration proposes to charge people $18,000 if they are arrested after being ordered removed for missing a hearing.
The proposed rule by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would impose an extraordinary $18,000 fee on immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after they have received in absentia removal orders.
The agency claims this unprecedented increase is necessary to deter immigrants from missing court and offset enforcement costs. However, ICE makes no mention of the astronomical resources it has received from Congress to cover its costs, its perverse role in scaring immigrants from attending their hearings, and the many systemic barriers that lead to missing court.
NIJC filed a comment calling for full rescission of this proposed rule.
DHS is making immigration court more difficult to attend.
Immigration court is far more complicated than DHS tries to suggest, especially for children and other individuals without access to legal representation. Immigrants are expected to navigate a rapidly changing system that can be challenging even for trained attorneys. Language barriers and literacy limitations further complicate the process, while the growing use of mass hearings makes court appearances ever more chaotic and intimidating. In recent months, the median notice before many hearings has dropped from approximately 200 days to just 66 days, leaving families scrambling to secure counsel and prepare for court. In some cases, the situation is even more extreme. NIJC clients in Chicago have received as little as 22 days notice before a scheduled hearing, with some reporting that they never actually received a hearing notice at all. Their experiences raise serious concerns about whether notices are being successfully mailed or delivered to respondents in the first place. The result has been a dramatic increase in in absentia removal orders, with an unprecedented 33,463 issued in May 2026 alone.
To make matters worse, ICE has manufactured new barriers to court attendance. In recent years, ICE has increasingly conducted arrest operations at or near immigration courthouses, creating fear that appearing for a hearing could lead to immediate detention, family separation, or deportation. Rather than encouraging court attendance, these practices force many individuals to choose between appearing in court and risking immediate detention or foregoing their hearing altogether.
The surge in missed court hearings is not simply the result of deliberate noncompliance. It is largely driven by barriers the Trump administration helped create. Rather than addressing these barriers, DHS proposes to cash in by imposing an $18,000 penalty.
$18,000 is an enormous fine for immigrants, and pennies to ICE’s gigantic budget.
DHS characterizes the proposed fee as an administrative charge designed to improve compliance with immigration proceedings. However, the size of the penalty, and the lack of evidence supporting it, suggest otherwise.
At $18,000, the proposed fee is clearly a punitive measure that would place an enormous burden on immigrants and their families, many of whom are already struggling with the financial consequences of detention, removal proceedings, and existing immigration fees. For countless families, $18,000 represents months or even years of income. Equally important is that DHS has failed to show that a penalty of this magnitude would actually improve court attendance. The agency points to rising numbers of in absentia removal orders but offers little evidence that increasing the fee from $5,130 to $18,000 would address the underlying causes of missed hearings.
The proposal is especially difficult to justify, since, in less than one year, Congress has granted ICE and other federal agencies nearly a quarter trillion dollars of taxpayer funds to conduct their crackdown on immigrant communities. ICE alone received approximately $75 billion through last year’s budget bill and an additional $38.5 billion just earlier month. At the same time, reports indicate that ICE and its sister DHS agency, Customs and Border Protection, have yet to spend roughly $100 billion already appropriated for immigration enforcement. Much of that funding is flowing directly to agencies that have wreaked havoc in our communities and private contractors who continue receiving billions in government contracts to operate detention centers. Under these conditions, DHS’s claim that it must dramatically increase this fee to alleviate pressure on agency resources is shameless.
The immigration system works best when people are able to meaningfully participate in it. That requires clear laws and fair procedures that address barriers to court attendance rather than deepening them. DHS’s proposed rule will only add to existing barriers by further eroding trust in a system that is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate day by day. NIJC calls on DHS to withdraw the proposal.
Bairavi Sundaram is a policy intern at the National Immigrant Justice Center.