Asylum law, explained by the lawyers who practice it

Asylum law moved more between the summer of 2025 and the summer of 2026 than in the ten years before it. A filing fee arrived for the first time. So did an annual fee. The automatic extension for work permit renewals ended. Interviews became optional for the government. Old Attorney General decisions came back. Some of those changes were then stayed or vacated by courts, and the official text of the regulations did not always catch up.

Most of that news reaches people secondhand, through a group chat or a notario, and much of it arrives wrong. This blog is our attempt to write it down correctly, in plain English, with the source attached.

How every post is checked

We keep a fact ledger. Each rule, fee, deadline and decision on this site has a row with the citation, the primary source and the date we verified it. A post may only state a fact that is in the ledger. If a fact is not verified, it is not published, and we do not soften it into a guess.

Each post shows the date its law was last checked and lists its sources at the bottom. When a rule changes, we update the post and the rule tracker instead of waiting for a publishing schedule.

What we will not do

• We do not publish client stories, composite people or case results. The cases we write about are public decisions.
• We do not publish grant rates. The immigration courts publish counts, and turning counts into a rate means choosing a denominator that can mislead.
• We do not tell you what will happen in your case. A blog post cannot know your facts, your country conditions or your judge.

Who we are

Usher Law Group is a litigation firm in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, founded by Mikhail Usher in 2013. The immigration practice handles asylum and removal defense in the immigration courts, appeals to the Board of Immigration Appeals and petitions for review. You can read about each author on the authors page and about the firm at usherlegal.com.

Why "Insider"

Because the people who know how asylum law actually works are the ones who use it every week: at a master calendar hearing with forty other cases on the docket, across a conference table with an interpreter, in a filing that has to arrive before the deadline. This blog is written from that seat. Our hands-on posts about hearings, filings and deadlines are collected under one name, From the Courtroom.