With immigration being a complex and rather formal process, people would expect the immigration service to do things correctly. Alas, employees in the immigration offices are people too — people who can make mistakes that will cause an immigration case to be more complicated than it has to be.


3 Ways Things Can Go Wrong in Immigration Cases (And How We Solve Them): Case Studies

Our law office has recently encountered three cases where immigration simply did not know what it was doing.


Mail Room Confusion in a Premium Processing Case

The first was a filing for a premium processing request, which was initially filed in September of 2022. It was rejected two times and on the third filing, immigration informed our firm that the case was already under premium processing. We knew, however, that that wasn’t possible because the office did not accept the forms nor cash the checks.

We had to have a very long conversation with an immigration officer over the phone, trying to explain to them the situation. We also wrote a big cover letter telling the mail room employee that they shouldn’t reject the request and they should cash the check. Basically, we had to tell them what to do, which is something we shouldn’t have had to explain.

Strange Request For Evidence

Another example involves a family-based immigration case. Immigration sent our office a request for evidence (RFE) telling us that the documents we submitted were not translated and asking us to provide a certified translation.

This request sounds very simple, and in fact, happens a lot in cases that involve non-English-speaking countries. However, the issue here was that all the documents were translated, with the certified translations attached in the initial filing.

Our office had to write a letter to USCIS, informing them that the initial filing included the certified translations they were asking for in the RFE. We also attached copies of the documents again to avoid the same problem down the road.


A Severe Case Turn Over Delay

Two years ago, in 2020, our office filed a form called I-824, which asks immigration to send a case file over to the National Visa Center. We paid a fee to move forward with processing and waited two years for the case to finally be approved in February 2022.

However, by October 2022, immigration has not yet turned the documents over to the National Visa Center and in essence, didn’t do exactly what we paid them to do. Our office had to contact USCIS and even get a senator involved to resolve the delay.


Possible Reason for Mistakes on Immigration’s End

All of these erroneous mistakes that our office encountered led us to think of reasons behind immigration messing up the process. Our theory is that immigration is doing a hiring spree to help with backlogs.

It might have all these new service officers and mailroom employees who are still undergoing their training. The result, of course, is more mistakes that shouldn’t even be happening in the first place.

The reality is that a lot of things can go wrong in the immigration process, which stresses the importance of working with an immigration attorney. It is a lawyer’s duty to help their clients overcome these issues and yield the best results for their cases.