Immigration law is one of the hardest areas of law to practice; policies and laws are constantly changing and we are at the mercy of elected officials that change every four years. It’s further complicated by our officials constantly issuing small fixes instead of solving bigger issues. Despite all this, though, I can’t imagine doing anything else.
Navigating Mailing Challenges with USCIS
Sometimes, though, we’re not fighting USCIS on a legal issue. Sometimes we end up fighting the mail, as silly as that sounds.
In March of 2022, our office moved from Marietta to Atlanta. At that time, we followed USCIS instructions on updating all of our cases’ mailing addresses. We mailed spreadsheets to each USCIS Service Center and Field Office where we had cases pending, of which we had 500. We set up mail forwarding for anything that may be sent to our old office, and, in many cases, we knew that the client would also receive a copy of the receipt or notice. So, if we didn’t receive our copy for any reason, we’d have a backup.
However, this is not true for humanitarian cases, such as VAWAs, Ts, and Us. As a precaution, USCIS mails both the applicant and attorney copies to the attorney’s address. In the first year of our move, the change of address was hit or miss. We received some humanitarian case correspondence at our office, but we also had a lot returned to USCIS since not all USCIS mail can be forwarded. This meant we only knew about a case being updated by checking online updates from the post office, which would say that we had mail being returned. We spent countless hours on the phone and through email with USCIS and the post office to get cards and letters properly sent to us.
Thankfully, now fewer items are being returned to USCIS, but it’s still causing issues for a few of our cases.
A Family’s Journey Through System Errors
One such case involves a family of three—a mom, a dad, and a son. Dad applied for a U visa in 2016, with his wife and son as derivatives. In late 2022, the case was granted a Bona Fide Determination, meaning they each should receive a UBFD Notice and their Employment Authorization Document. We received the dad’s and son’s notices and work cards at our new address, but the mom’s documents were apparently sent to the old address. We tried for over six months to get her card rerouted to us to no avail. Ultimately, we decided to start fresh and just refile the work card application. Finally, in January 2024, her work card arrived in our Atlanta office.
We thought everything was fine then. Silly us.
This July, we received a denial of the mom’s full U-2 status in the mail, apparently because her husband’s U-1 status had been denied. We had no idea about the U-1 Denial, and the U-2 Denial letter didn’t give us any information. We were shocked.
With the help of Senator Warnock’s office, we learned that a request for evidence had been mailed to our old Marietta office and subsequently returned to USCIS in March. Since we didn’t respond to the request, USCIS denied the case. This wasn’t right and we couldn’t let the denial stand. This family had been waiting so long and shouldn’t be punished for USCIS’ failings.
Senator Warnock’s office was able to get us a copy of the request and we had the information USCIS needed, so we quickly filed an appeal. We discussed the systematic issues of our change of address and the substantive issues in the request for evidence.
Just last week, we received notification that the family’s cases were all recently reopened and approved. I am praying that the notices and cards get sent to our “new” address (is it really new after 2.5 years?)