Removal of Conditions - 2 year wait time.

[OfficerT 1]

So after an extremely nerve-racking wait for a green card, I thought it would be helpful to share my story since I wasn't able to find much relevant help online during my journey.  I can't remember very specific dates though.

 

I'm from Florida and my wife is from Jamaica a F1 Visa.  We met at a workplace that she probably shouldn't have been at, but she quit after her visa expired but before we started filing for a green card.  We hired a lawyer for $2,000 but the guy was trying to get us to lie on our application, so we dropped him, losing the money, and did it ourselves.  It was cake and it was fast.  Interview didn't even have a single question and we we got a temporary green card shortly after.  After I suppose 21 months, we filed for the removal of conditions and waited another 6 months before receiving an RFE.  It said that we needed to provide W2's to support the tax returns (1040s) we submitted and we needed to include all transaction pages with our joint bank account statements (we only submitted the first pages).  So we procrastinated a bit but got it off before the deadline in December.

 

We checked periodically online as to the status of our application.  It moved from Vermont to California and we received a letter saying so.  At some point we called and learned that our application had moved to our local office in Jacksonville.  Around the end of spring, we traveled to our local office in Jacksonville to get my wife's I-94 stamp renewed so that she could continue working.  (They printed out a new one by the way.)  They also told us that we were just waiting to have an interview scheduled which gave us hope.  But come October, ten months since we filed the RFE, we decided we need to figure something out.  We traveled the two hours each way to talk to a clerk at the local office who told us basically nothing.  I brought a giant stack of further documentation hoping to drop it off and force someone to dig up our application, but the clerk said I would need to mail it in if I wanted to do that.

 

So this is where it gets weird.  We were just sitting in the parking lot after our short appointment trying to decide on a game plan when I heard a lawyer next to us talking to a client.  My wife decided to try to get a quick opinion of the lawyer, who I'll call Susan.  Susan was very intrigued that we were having so many problems and thought something fishy was going on.  She also told me that my plan to submit more evidence and get the gears rolling wasn't a good plan (I now think she may be wrong).  So she told us that she was extremely familiar with our local office and told us a story about how tough she can be with them so we decided we probably needed to retain her.  We paid her for a background check and the next day she informs us that we have a seriously messed up case.  She says there are almost no official records of my wife having any legal foothold in the country and that this is seemingly impossible unless someone is "out to get her" and has the ability to delete official records.  She tells us that we may be in for a very long and hard legal fight but she is willing to take our case.  At this point I'm just hearing dollar signs and am assuming this will be tens of thousands of dollars. But no, Susan quotes us $1750 and says we can pay in installments if we need to.  So after we hang up after a long conversation, we are extremely paranoid and confused.

 

Susan told us we need to submit a FOIA request for my wife's original Social Security number application. The SSA website says you can only do this for dead people, telephone helper at the SSA says its impossible, but we file it anyway with a notarized statement verifying my wife's identity, and 4 weeks later FOIA works and we get the original application.  But, before this we receive an appointment letter!  Hallelujah!  The letter says we MUST bring ALL bank statements, ALL utility bills, and ALL leases/mortgages for the entire time we've been together.  We have two joint bank accounts so I'm thinking this is like thousands of pages of documentation.  I'm wondering if this is normal or evidence that we're walking into a meat grinder.  The appointment was scheduled for about two weeks from when I received the letter so I start scrambling and spending hours online and at the print store cranking out a huge box of papers.  We decide not to hire Susan for the appointment but are very worried.

 

On the drive to appointment, not sure if we're driving into a brick wall, my wife emails Susan for the hell of it who responds telling us that we really should retain her and that she can move her schedule around if we can send her $1900 in the next couple minutes.  We instead try to have a plan to cut the interview short and reschedule so that we can get a lawyer if we get bad vibes from the interviewer.  So interviewer calls us in and thankfully it was just a rubber stamp.  Again not a single question.  I brought my box full of bank statements, bills, photos, etc, but the interviewer didn't really want any it.  We gave her a copy of our mortgage, but it barely fit in our case folder.  The interviewer couldn't have been more relaxed or more oblivious to the reasons we would be stressed out.  She said she was just trying to clear out cases as quickly as possible.

 

So I think the summary I can offer is that we were 0/2 on lawyers being helpful and 0/2 on interviews actually having questions at the Jacksonville Field Office.  Also, when it says "you MUST bring ALL bank statements" to your interview, that's just not true.  The evil people who wrote the letter should have said, "you SHOULD bring A FEW bank statements because our folder is only an inch thick".  And also make sure you do provide all pages for the evidence you submit so that they service center folks don't have an excuse to not take care of you. But this is just my two cents relative to our case and it could be different for others.  Sorry I wrote so much, but there was a lot we learned and I wanted to get it all down because I know things change from year to year.

[Villanelle 4,122]

Sounds like "Susan" needs to be reported.... a background check? and it showed an issue? Very vague... and your logic of 'if it was a scam it would be costly'. Um oh my. Not true at all. You can be scammed for one dollar. Just because it was presented as 'affordable' you assumed it was legit- because of course a scam would be costly!

 

Nothing in your case is outrageous- yes, you had a wait from Spring until Oct to get an interview. Depending on the schedule in the local office- your wait for an interview slot can be anywhere from days to weeks to months. For you guys it was a few months. Nothing strange about that at all...

 

Also- please do not encourage others to NOT bring evidence to interviews. Sometimes its asked for, sometimes its not. Its better to be over prepared then under prepared. 

 

 

[OfficerT 1]

Damara, you got a couple things wrong about my story.  I DID assume it was a scam because of the low price.  The lawyer made it sound like hundreds of hours of work so why would she quote us less than $2000?  Also, it was spring we filed the initial I-751 until NEXT December that we had the interview.  So about 20 months.  12 months for the RFE. The very longest wait I ever saw on any forum was 6 months for the entire process and most people say USCIS responds quickly to an RFE.  I just want people to know that it is possible that this is normal despite the overwhelming urge to feel that you are screwed.

 

And I'm not necessarily discouraging people from bringing evidence, I'm just relaying how absurd the demand in the letter was.  I spend hundreds of dollars to print thousands of pages of stuff.  And carried in a 20 pound box of paper that wasn't even half of what the letter demanded that I MUST bring.  To fulfill what the letter said I MUST bring, because of the 4 years between the temporary card and this interview, I would have had tens of thousands of pages probably weighing over 50 pounds.  I would have had to had my wife help me carry the box just to meet the minimum amount of evidence demanded by the letter.  And then we didn't have the officer show even the slightest amount of interest in it.  It was discouraging to spend so much time doing such an insane thing.  Actually, we were a little late for the appointment because we were at the print store in Jacksonville about 30 minutes prior to the meeting and the printer wasn't working well.  The officer actually called my cell phone at exact time of our meeting.  I don't regret it considering all the background of our case, but I couldn't believe how absurd the entire thing was.  I doubt that USCIS has a warehouse full of 50 pound boxes of evidence.

Edited January 30, 2017 by OfficerT