Trump Moves to Make It a Whole Lot More Expensive to Become a Citizen

The Department of Homeland Security is planning to wildly increase citizenship application fees.

The Department of Homeland Security has proposed a massive increase in citizenship application fees, as the Trump administration continues to upend legal immigration.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services proposed a rule Monday that would raise the fee for a paper citizenship application by 75 percent from $760 to $1,330, and the fee for an online application by 80 percent from $710 to $1,280, according to Newsweek.

The proposed rule would also make it more expensive to seek a hearing challenging a denied naturalization. If adopted, the rule would raise the fee for an appeal from $830 to $1,475 by paper, and from $780 to $1,425 online.

Under the proposed rule, the government would scrap fee waivers and a reduced-fee option for individuals experiencing financial hardship. The changes would present a significant financial hurdle for lower-income immigrants, further transforming legal immigration into a privilege for the extremely wealthy and a moneymaking scheme for the federal government.

This proposed rule is yet another way the Trump administration is attempting to curb legal immigration. The government has stacked the deck by appointing immigration judges bent on denying asylum claims, curbed America’s refugee program, and imposed steep price increases on H-1B visas.

Judge Smacks Down Trump’s Attempt to Get Maryland’s Voter Rolls

It’s the ninth time a federal court has stopped the Trump administration from getting voter information.

President Donald Trump has struck out nine times in court in his quest to obtain voter registration data from states, reports Democracy Docket.

On Thursday, a federal judge threw out the Department of Justice’s lawsuit seeking voter data from Maryland.

“This Court joins every court to have addressed this issue in concluding that an [statewide voter registration list] is not a record or paper that a state must produce to the United States under the CRA,” District Judge Stephanie Gallagher wrote in the ruling.

The DOJ’s quest to weaponize voter registration data as part of its immigration crackdown has not been going too well. So far, it has not prevailed in a........

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