DHS and Justice Department Finalize Fast-Track Immigration Fines Days After a Boston Judge Froze Them

The Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department have made permanent the fast-track system ICE and CBP use to fine immigrants who stay in the country after a removal order, miss a voluntary departure deadline or are caught entering illegally. The final rule, filed for public inspection on Oct. 9 and scheduled to take effect when it is published in the Federal Register on Oct. 14, arrives days after a federal judge in Boston froze the same process, and it sets up an early test of whether a finished rulemaking can put back what a court has halted.

The stakes are financial, and for some people enormous. The daily penalty for willfully failing to leave after a final removal order is up to $998, and Reuters has reported that DHS applied it retroactively for up to five years, producing individual fines as high as $1.8 million. As of July, DHS had issued more than 103,000 fines totaling about $84 billion since January 2025, according to Reuters. The new rule changes none of those amounts. What it locks in is the process: who decides, how fast, and who can review the decision.

A 148-page rule with a single change

The document finalizes an interim final rule that took effect without advance public comment on June 27, 2025 (90 FR 27439). That interim rule did three things practitioners have been fighting ever since. It scrapped the old notice of intent to fine and the 30-day window that came with it, so an ICE or CBP officer now issues a decision and order directly. It cut the time to appeal to 15 business days, with review by a supervisory officer on the written record and no in-person interview. And it removed the Board of Immigration Appeals from the picture entirely, making the supervisor’s decision the final agency action, subject only to discretionary review by the Secretary of Homeland Security.

The final rule keeps all of that. The Departments made a single change after reviewing 28 public comments: ICE may now accept a late appeal when a person documents a mail delivery delay that ICE finds was beyond their control. Everything else, including the supervisory review timelines (review within 10 days of receiving an appeal and a final decision within 45 days), carries over.

Three statutes are involved, and none of them is new. Section 274D of the Immigration and Nationality Act penalizes a person under a final removal order who willfully fails or refuses to depart or acts to obstruct removal. Section 240B(d) sets a penalty for failing to leave within a voluntary departure period, now $1,992 to $9,970 after inflation adjustment, with a $3,000 default set by an immigration judge. Section 275(b) imposes $100 to $500 for each unlawful entry or attempted entry between ports. Congress authorized the civil penalties in 1996, and Reuters has reported that no administration sought to impose them until President Trump’s first term. The rule states that it does not change who can be fined or how much; it changes only the procedure.

Why the timing matters: the Boston stay

In Maria L. v. Noem, a class action brought by two immigrants and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. stayed the 2025 interim rule while the case proceeds and blocked enforcement of fines imposed under it. Bloomberg Law reported the order was dated Sept. 30; it became public in news reports on Oct. 6. According to Reuters and Bloomberg Law, the judge found two kinds of problems. One was procedural: the government skipped notice-and-comment rulemaking when it changed the process. The other went to how fines were being issued: notices on boilerplate forms that lacked specific allegations, without an individual finding that a person’s failure to leave was willful, which the judge said likely conflicts with the INA and the Administrative Procedure Act. He also cited the plaintiffs’ risk of insolvency.

A final rule issued after public comment is the standard way an agency cures a notice-and-comment defect, and the government can be expected to argue that the procedural half of the court’s reasoning no longer applies once the rule is published. The substantive half is harder to paper over. A rule that, by its own terms, leaves the penalty criteria unchanged does not by itself show that officers are making individual willfulness findings in each case. DHS will likely point to the rule’s requirement that every decision state the statutory basis and include a brief explanation. Whether that satisfies Judge O’Toole is a question only he, and possibly the First Circuit, can answer.

DHS has defended the fines as lawful. A department spokesperson told Fox News that the INA “allows for civil penalties against aliens that fail to depart.” In the rule, the Departments argue that additional procedures “would not enhance the accuracy, fairness, or reliability of the process,” and they answer commenters’ warnings about eviction, bankruptcy and garnished wages by noting that the rule itself authorizes no seizure of assets: collection runs through separate debt law, and the Justice Department must sue in federal court first. They also point to the CBP Home program, under which DHS says it will forgive most fines for people who self-depart.

What the government’s own figures show

The rule includes the most detailed public accounting yet of how the fine program has operated, and the numbers cut in more than one direction.

Measure	Before the interim rule (Mar. 26 to June 26, 2025)	Under the interim rule (June 27, 2025 to mid-Sept. 2026)
Civil penalties issued	12,135	About 110,000 failure-to-depart penalties (ICE) plus 66,000 unlawful-entry penalties (CBP)
Weekly pace	About 930	Nearly 2,800
Penalties contested or appealed	222 (under 2%)	3,072 appeals of about 110,000 ICE penalties (nearly 3%), through Sept. 10, 2026
People who self-departed after receiving a penalty	About 540	About 7,180

Source: DHS and EOIR final rule, “Imposition and Collection of Civil Penalties for Certain Immigration-Related Violations,” Federal Register public-inspection document 2026-21024, filed Oct. 9, 2026. The two periods differ in length (about 13 weeks versus about 63 weeks).

Three things stand out. First, the streamlined process roughly tripled the weekly rate of fines, which is the efficiency the government set out to achieve. Second, very few people appeal, yet those who do often win: the rule reports that people prevailed in 25 percent of the post-interim-rule appeals that were decided. The government cites that figure as proof that the review process works; critics are likely to read it as a sign that many fines would not survive scrutiny if more were challenged. Third, the fines appear to play a modest role in getting people to leave. The rule counts about 82,000 people with removal or voluntary departure orders who self-departed from March 2025 through Sept. 14, 2026, of whom more than 7,700 did so after receiving a penalty, about 9 percent by our calculation from the rule’s figures.

The scale of the potential target population is large. The rule says about 1.5 million people were on ICE’s non-detained docket with final orders before the interim rule, that immigration courts issued more than 282,000 final removal orders in fiscal 2024 with roughly 10 percent executed, and that more than 3.4 million cases were pending in immigration court in the third quarter of fiscal 2026. Dividing the $84 billion Reuters reported by the 103,000 fines it counted gives an average of roughly $815,000 per fine, a calculation that shows how heavily the totals are driven by the daily failure-to-depart penalty rather than the smaller entry and voluntary departure fines.

Can the Board of Immigration Appeals or an immigration judge review the fine?

No, for failure-to-depart and unlawful-entry penalties. The supervisory officer’s decision is final, subject only to discretionary review by the DHS Secretary. The rule notes that before 2025 only 44 penalty appeals reached the Board, which had issued two decisions as of Sept. 10, 2026. The voluntary departure penalty is different: an immigration judge or the Board sets that amount as part of the removal case.

Can the government take my wages or bank account to collect?

Not under this rule alone. The Departments state that the rule does not authorize seizing savings, garnishing wages or taking assets; collection is governed by separate federal debt law, and the Justice Department must sue in federal court before pursuing liens or seizures. That is a statement about this rule, not a promise about other collection tools, so the practical risk depends on what happens after a fine becomes final.

The next moves

Publication is set for Oct. 14. From there, the likeliest paths, based on how similar disputes have unfolded, are a government motion asking Judge O’Toole to lift or narrow his stay in light of the final rule, an amended complaint from the plaintiffs challenging the final rule itself, or an appeal to the First Circuit. The government has not said publicly which it will pursue. For the people behind the roughly 176,000 penalties issued under the interim rule, the answer will decide whether those fines stay frozen or move toward collection.

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

Administrator

Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds a LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Deigo and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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