Washington, DC - Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), Chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law, offered the following statement today on the proposed fee increase of 66% on average for processing naturalization and immigration applications by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS):

“Although I want to ensure that USCIS has the necessary resources to carry out its mission, the scope and scale of this fee increase on immigration applications raises many questions for me.  I plan to carefully examine the USCIS’s new study and the justification for this increase with my colleagues on the Immigration Subcommittee before its implementation.  Changes in the current fee structure must be fair and reasonable.”