USCIS Stopped Taking Checks - And Most Immigration Firms Still Have No Clean Way to Pay a Filing Fee Out of Trust in 2026

USCIS no longer accepts checks or money orders for any filing fee. Every paper-filed petition now needs a Form G-1450 credit card authorization or a Form G-1650 ACH debit, with paper payment allowed only by rare exemption on Form G-1651. That sounds like a payments story. It is actually a trust accounting story: a firm credit card is not an IOLTA account, and the moment you front a $1,540 government fee on plastic you have converted advanced client costs into a hard cost you now have to recover. Here is the workflow that keeps the money clean.