For people seeking work or an escape to a better life in the United States, it's going to cost about two times the current amount, following a move by the Trump administration to hike fees on various immigration applications.
Michelle Mendez, director of defending vulnerable programs at the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), calls the move an assault on immigration.
"This rule, these fees that have increased will make it extremely difficult for individuals to become legal immigrants, specifically to become naturalized immigrants, to become citizens," Mendez told Cheddar.
The new fees, which are set to be increased in October, will also gravely impact the world's most at-risk populations seeking asylum in the U.S., Mendez added.
"$50 may seem to be a small fee for many of us. We have to understand that asylum seekers leave their countries, they flee their countries with practically nothing," she said.
While news of the increased fees may be looked on as damning, Mendez said the move is on par with the Trump administration's previous moves to eliminate "access to the legal immigration process."
"During the [presidential] campaign, the rhetoric was very much focused on illegal immigration. We knew that that actually meant they were going to attack illegal and legal immigration," she said.
For Mendez, the idea of increasing fees and making the process even more difficult for people who want to become American is a jab at the foundation upon which the country was built.
"When we limit the opportunity for people to be engaged in the process by being citizens, that really undermines our democracy. That really undermines our democratic process," she stated.
President Erdogan of Turkey demanded action from Saudi Arabia on Tuesday for the "premeditated" and "savage" murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, as SoftBank's CEO became the latest top executive to pull back from Saudi Arabia's investor summit.
Billionaire activist Tom Steyer is not apologizing for his campaign to impeach Donald Trump. In an interview with Cheddar Monday, he dismissed criticism from certain Democrats that focusing on impeachment will energize the Republican base. "Standing up for the Constitution and the American people" should be more important than campaign tactics, he said.
Political spectators are readying themselves for a midterm fight to the finish, but Gov. John Carney of Delaware thinks they would do well to focus on the issues ー not just winning the race. "It seems like we get bogged down in the politics of our own teams," Carney said of the divisive state of politics during an interview with Cheddar Monday. "It gets in the way of improving things that are important."
Amazon, Alphabet, Twiter, and other big tech companies are set to report quarterly earnings this week. Elon Musk says The Boring Company's high-speed transit tunnel will be open to the public on December 10. And Zane Holtz, star of the upcoming film 'Hunter Killer,' joins Cheddar to discuss what it's like working with big-name talent such as Gary Oldman and Gerard Butler in this new movie.
Valerie Plame Wilson says a movie about the George W. Bush White House's exposure of her covert role as a CIA agent is more relevant than ever in the Trump era of "lies and deception." Plame spoke to Cheddar Monday alongside director Doug Liman on the occasion of the re-release of Liman's 2010 film "Fair Game."
The Massachusetts Senator has urged the Fed once again to put pressure on Wells Fargo for its fake bank account scandal. Pete Schroeder, a financial correspondent at Reuters, said this rhetoric is in line with Warren's politics and does not necessarily signal a 2020 presidential run.
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Arianna Huffington, the CEO of Thrive, is one of many business execs to pull out of the "Davos in the Desert" business summit in Saudi Arabia after the controversy surrounding a missing and presumed-dead Washington Post journalist. Huffington said she was "surprised" by the Trump administration's handling of the situation.
Deepa Seetharaman, tech reporter for the Wall Street Journal, said the company is still unsure of who's responsible for the most recent hack, in which 30 million user accounts were compromised. And perhaps more importantly, it still doesn't know where all the data went.
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