By now, Americans have become familiar with seeing masked federal agents snatching people off the street and outside courthouses. Separations of families of asylum seekers and other non-citizens, and occasionally even citizens, are all part of the malevolence of U.S. immigration policy.

But far less attention has gone to another measure that makes desperate and endangered people more vulnerable — the fees they must pay to get through the asylum process.

Among the many harms of President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” was the imposition of substantial new fees for applying for asylum, applying for permission to work while seeking asylum, filing a notice to appeal an immigration court decision and many other elements of the process.

The new fees are unaffordable to many asylu

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