When Daniel arrived in the U.S. about two decades ago, he came on a legal tourist visa. Once here, having fled his home country in South America, he filed an asylum application. A judge, however, eventually denied his claim.
Then 11 years ago, he married his partner, a U.S. citizen. Together, they had two children, who are also citizens. The couple filed a petition to grant him legal status through their marriage, but then Daniel was issued a deportation order, which presented a barrier in his case.
It’s hard to comprehend how it can be so difficult to legally stay with one’s family, but Daniel, for whom The Intercept is using a pseudonym, would soon face an even more mystifying hurdle: He recently received a letter from the government saying he owes about $368,000, according to his attorney, who recounted his tale.
Last year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order using a never-before-touched law to levy fines on an immigrant for each day he “willfully fails or refuses” to leave after receiving a removal order. Trump’s order also increased the fine from $500 to $998 per day to, supposedly, update it for inflation.
The Trump administration quickly started issuing fines as high as $1.8 million — the maximum penalty for the maximum five-year period, although unpaid fines can also accrue interest — to immigrants last year. As of July, more than 100,000 immigrants had received notices of fines, totaling more than $84 million, according to the government.
The administration says it will forgive the debts if immigrants leave the country.
Daniel is eager to pay as much as he can, fearing the financial and immigration repercussions of not responding to the notice he received. But there’s a big problem: He can’t.
And it’s not for a lack of funds. Instead, Daniel simply doesn’t have the information necessary to make a payment; the government never provided it to him. The letter he received informing him of the fines he owed had a blank field where there should have been an identification number for the online payments system. (The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.)
Daniel and his wife tried putting his Social Security number and the alien number that tracks him in the immigration system into the website. Neither worked. His wife even tried calling to find out how to pay, only to sit on hold for over an hour and a half and then have the call disconnect.
“It’s ‘Hurry and pay — oh, by the way, we’re not going to give you any appropriate information,’” said Melanie Zamenhof, a senior attorney on the New York Legal Response Team at Neighbors Link, who has been helping Daniel.
Daniel’s experience is not unique. Zamenhof hasn’t had a single immigrant client who was able to successfully pay the fine the administration levied against them. No one at her organization has, either.
No Way to Pay
The letters immigrants are receiving about the fines are typically brief.
They include the date an immigrant was issued an order of removal and a checked box saying, “You willfully failed or refused to depart from the United States pursuant to the order.” Based on that, the letters say, “you are subject to a civil monetary penalty.”
The letters don’t explain how the figures have been calculated, whether interest has been applied and at what rate, or even when the fines started being tolled or when they might stop.
The letters say recipients only have 15 business days after issuance to formally contest the fines, though many received them after the period had expired.
“Like any bill that anyone receives,” Zamenhof said, “you always want an explanation of benefits, some breakdown.”
This year, the helpline at Neighbors Link started getting calls from about a dozen immigrants saying they’d received letters. The callers asked the attorneys where they should go to pay what they were told they owe.
“All the attorneys are like, ‘What a great question. Where do you pay it?’” Zamenhof said.
Finding a working website to pay the fines leads to dead ends. Typically, immigration-related fees are paid to other agencies, such as the Department of Justice or U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, but none of those avenues work for the failure-to-leave fines.
Instead, a sheet included with the government letters offers “payment options.” Those include a QR code that points to pay.gov and instructions to search for “DHS Civil Penalty and Fee” in a box on the website.
The pay.gov website is frequently down, Zamenhof said, and when it’s working, the option to pay the civil penalty is sometimes not on the dropdown menu.
The government also no longer accepts cashier’s checks or money orders, Zamenhof said, which means the fines can only be paid with a debit or credit card — a hurdle on its own for any immigrant who can’t qualify for a U.S. bank account yet.
Meanwhile, to get through the payment system an immigrant must have a payor number; the information sheet says they need a “penalty tracking number.” That’s supposed to be on the letters they receive about their fines, but Zamenhof has seen multiple letters like Daniel’s, where the field for the number is left blank.
Even if someone were able to get through to a payment page, most don’t have these vast sums of money at hand. Attorneys at Neighbors Link have seen amounts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars; the fines go as high as $1,820,352.
A recent report from the New York University Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic found that none of the immigrant advocates they spoke to had clients who were able to pay.
“They’re always going for the maximum amount that they think they can charge based on just the passage of time,” said Hasan Shafiqullah, the supervising attorney for immigration at the Legal Aid Society. “Nobody has that money laying around.”
A Willful Failure?
There doesn’t appear to be any way to make a partial payment or set up a payment plan. All the while, the fines and interest keep accruing as people are unable to pay any of it off. Even if someone pays the entire amount, it’s not clear that will stop more fines from accruing.
The Legal Aid Society is among a coalition that sued the Department of Homeland Security over the fines, arguing that they have not been legally assessed nor that recipients have a meaningful opportunity to contest them.
“They’re not making an individualized determination about: ‘Am I unwillful?’” Shafiqullah argued. “The fact that I have a removal order and I’m physically present isn’t enough to show that I willfully failed to depart. Y’all didn’t make an individual determination, there’s no space on the form to do that.”
According to the New York University report, 71 percent of survey respondents had legal immigration status or protection against removal or were in the process of pursuing remedies.
The immigrants who come to the Legal Aid Society often have or are seeking permission to stay in the country. Some have an order of supervision from ICE that allows them to stay and work; others are seeking legal status through visas for victims of crime or through their family members.
Some of the people facing the fines have even successfully reopened their immigration cases and no longer have an order of removal.
“They’re not willfully failing to depart, they’re doing all the things they’re entitled to do under the law,” he said.
Even when immigrants in these situations have appealed their fines, Shafiqullah said, they’ve been denied.
Failure to pay could result in the government seizing assets, including people’s homes, or wage or tax refund garnishment. As of May, the administration had initiated over 50 lawsuits against immigrants to get them to pay, in some cases seeking their tax refunds. One immigrant woman says the Treasury Department seized her and her U.S. citizen’s joint tax refund and reported her to credit bureaus.
The administration is also sending the debts to collections agencies, which are adding hundreds of thousands on to the original amounts in administrative fees.
Not paying could also harm potential pathways to legal immigration status: Judges can deem unpaid debt to the government a negative factor — potentially leading green card applicants to be labeled as “public charges,” blocking them.
Zamenhof, the lawyer from Neighbors Link, has been urging clients to document their attempts to pay their fines — recording how many phone calls they made and taking screenshots of the faulty website portal being down or broken — in case their debt is brought before a judge.
Daniel and his wife are ready to pay a quarter of what the government says he owes and find a way to pay down the rest, though they would still like to understand a breakdown of how the charges and interest were calculated.
“They’re very eager to comply with this, even though they dispute and don’t agree with the total amount,” Zamenhof said.
Constant Fear
For now, Daniel lives in constant fear because he can’t pay. He worries that his wages, tax refund, and children’s college fund could all be at risk of government seizure. Will debt collectors show up at the couple’s door and shake them down? Worse, will ICE show up and detain Daniel?
Even if none of this comes to pass, there’s still an open question: Will owing outstanding fines to the government harm his attempt to reopen and terminate the removal order against him and become a green card holder through his wife? What will a judge say?
“Is it now going to be seen as a negative factor,” Zamenhof said, “despite all of our best efforts to comply?”
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** I’M BEN MUESSIG,** The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.
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