USCIS charges the exact same filing fee no matter where you live. A citizenship application costs $760 whether you're filing from Jackson, Mississippi or Washington, D.C. But a new study makes the case that "same fee" and "same burden" are two very different things — and the gap between them is bigger than most people assume. On August 4, 2026, CitizenPath published its inaugural 2026 U.S. Immigration Affordability Index, the first study to translate the real, all-in cost of

On Saturday, two members of Congress walked into a detention facility in Tacoma, Washington, to check on reports that over 140 people inside had stopped eating. When they asked staff who was participating in the strike, they were handed paperwork describing which sections of the building weren't involved. "It makes it very hard to parse what is actually happening in these facilities when we are hearing separate accounts," one of the representatives said afterward. That gap —

The Unfinished Cold War: Why Cuba Is Back on Washington’s Radar in 2026 I. Prologue: The Island That Refused to Bow When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a statement in Spanish in May 2026 calling Cuba “the last bastion of tyranny in the hemisphere,” Washington felt a familiar tremor. It was as if a dormant fault line — one buried under decades of geopolitical sediment — suddenly shifted. Cuba, only 150 kilometers from Florida, has long been the United States’ most