A Syrian couple with a pending asylum case filed the husband’s Form I-765 for a work permit and got back a denial they could not parse. The notice said no fee had accompanied the application, yet their credit card had been charged. Jim Hacking untangled what actually happened, and it turns on a single dropdown choice.
The asylum work permit is employment authorization category (c)(8) (8 CFR § 274a.12(c)(8)). The husband had held a C(8) card years earlier under an older asylum case that was later dismissed. When that case ended and a new one was filed, he applied again and marked the I-765 as an initial application, because to him it was a brand-new case. USCIS read the file differently: because he had a prior C(8) grant on record, it treated this as a renewal, and its rules charge a fee for a renewal C(8) but not for an initial one. Marking “initial” meant the system expected no fee, so, per the notice, any fee submitted would be returned, and the application was denied for the mismatch.
The result is the maddening contradiction the caller read aloud: the agency kept the money while stating that no money was owed or paid. Hacking’s fix matched what the couple’s own attorney had proposed.
mic What the Attorney Says
“I would do exactly what your lawyer said. I would dispute it. I would file a new one, mark it as a renewal, and I would challenge and try to get my money back.”
The practical steps are two-track. Refile the I-765 immediately, this time coded as a renewal under (c)(8) with the correct fee, so the work permit keeps moving. Separately, dispute the fee that was taken on the denied filing rather than letting the agency quietly keep it. The classification detail matters because a new asylum application does not necessarily reset your EAD history. USCIS looks at whether you have ever held that category before, not at which case it belongs to.
For asylum applicants, the broader lesson is that these cards are slow and easy to trip up on, which is why EAD delays have driven a wave of lawsuits, and why keeping your own paper trail and pushing back on errors is essential. It is the same discipline as documenting everything when a lawyer’s mistake costs you.