The US State Department under President Donald Trump has been accused of stealing more than a billion dollars from immigrants and sponsors in what experts are calling “the largest fraud in the history of the US immigration system.”

A report published last week by the Cato Institute, written by director of immigration studies David J. Bier, found that the State Department and Department of Homeland Security were receiving millions of applications from immigrants whom Trump has made ineligible for legal status and pocketing the fees without ever processing the requests.

“The US government collected over $1 billion in immigration fees then refused to process the applications,” said Austin Kocher, a fellow at Immigration Lab and a professor at Newhouse and Syracuse University in a social media post breaking down the report on Monday. “No denials. No refunds. Just silence.”

The report zeroes in on a series of policies signed by Trump and enacted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) head Joseph Edlow, which have collectively barred nationals from 92 countries from immigrating to the US.

One proclamation signed by Trump in December bans legal entry and most visas for the nationals of 40 nations—including Cuba, Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, and Haiti—based on nationality. A memo sent by Edlow extended the freeze to many USCIS immigration-benefit applications for people from targeted countries already living in the US, including work authorization and permanent residency filings

Another State Department policy bans visa applications from immigrants in 75 countries from being processed indefinitely, purportedly based on data showing that residents of those countries use welfare at disproportionately high rates.

These policies block more than 320,000 people abroad from entering the US and potentially as many as 561,000 potential permanent residents when those already living in the US are considered.

Although people from these countries are categorically denied immigrant visas and most other visa types under a series of travel bans signed by Trump, the government is still collecting fees for visas, work permits, and green cards.

The report cited evidence that the department has directed consular officers that they “should not counsel applicants or advise them” that they are subject to the bans when they come in for their interviews, because it “could be seen as pre-adjudication.”

Upon revealing this directive last month, immigration attorney Curtis Morrison described it as a way that “embassies scam visa applicants subject to the travel ban out of fees.”

As Bier explained:

To immigrate to the United States or to obtain authorization to work or travel internationally, noncitizens must usually pay a fee to have their applications processed. USCIS’s immigration fee revenues were nearly $7 billion, and the Consular Affairs budget was about $6 billion.

The fees stack up. For instance, to sponsor a spouse, a US citizen must pay a $675 fee to USCIS to petition for their spouse to obtain lawful permanent residence. Then, the immigrant must pay $1,440 to adjust status from temporary to permanent residence. That application takes so long that people usually pay $560 for the spouse to receive an employment authorization document, so the total fees can add up to $2,675.

Bier estimated that more than 2 million applications were affected by the bans, with fees coming primarily from work permit filings and permanent residency or immigrant visa applications.

He explained that these fees are difficult to track precisely because the government does not publish detailed statistics on them. He was also forced to rely on out-of-date fee statistics from 2023-24 because the Trump administration “has simply stopped publishing most statistics.”

That said, Bier noted that the numbers are most likely to “understate reality” because they include only those who likely had their requests processed in the past year, not those whose processing was delayed by backlogs.

Of the more than $1 billion in fees the Trump administration would have collected for services it never rendered, data from previous years suggested that about $543 million came from Cuban immigrants, who filed about 935,000 applications during the period under review.

The next highest were Venezuelans, who paid an estimated $138 million in fees. Iranians, Haitians, and Afghans were also among the nationalities with the highest numbers of unprocessed applications.

The Trump administration has used high-profile instances of fraud committed by members of immigrant groups, such as Somalis in Minneapolis, to cast aspersions upon entire nationalities and target them for immigration bans and attacks by federal law enforcement.

However, as Bier explained before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, based on the findings of a Cato report, “immigrants aren’t to blame” for most welfare fraud, accounting for just 5% of it, 31% less per capita than native-born US citizens.

He argued that the Department of Homeland Security “isn’t anti-fraud” but instead “openly carrying out the largest fraud in the history of the US immigration system… raking in billions of dollars in immigration fees and not providing the adjudications that applicants are entitled to.”

“DHS and State can deny anyone who fails to make their case. Instead, this administration is pocketing thousands of dollars from hardworking Americans and their relatives, including spouses and minor children of US citizens, and then not even looking at their applications,” he said. “This is a scam. This is fraud.”

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