Where's my damn Green Card? Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing all throughout the United States out of our offices in St. Louis, San Diego, and Washington DC. It's such a great moment when you finally get word that your Green Card is being produced. And then you wait patiently for it to actually arrive. Now, of course the people that approve your Green Card are not the same people that produce your Green Card. Your Green Cards are produced at a production center in the state of Kentucky and typically, once you receive that, "Your card is being produced," notice, it doesn't take long at all for the Green Card to arrive. It should be there within a week or two.
If it takes longer than that, there might be something wrong. Now, I wanted to shoot this video to talk about what happens when your Green Card never arrives. So we're not talking about waiting for the actual case to be approved, we're talking about the problems in production or, more specifically, the problems with delivery. Now, different reasons can cause you to not receive your Green Card. One reason might be because you put your wrong address with USCIS or that you hadn't updated your address with USCIS. So that's one sphere, one way that you might not receive your Green Card.
Another is that USCIS might send it to the wrong place. USCIS might send it through USPS and not send it to the right address. We've seen that happen before. And then, finally, the post office might screw it up themselves. And that's actually a rather frequent occurrence, unfortunately, and it's such a bummer because you were so excited about getting approved but now you don't have a Green Card. You might be approved for lawful permanent residence status, you might be able to get a driver's license, but you're not going to actually have the Green Card.
So now whose fault is it? Well, whose fault is it is a really big question because whose fault is it may impact, number one, your ability to get the actual Green Card that was sent or, number two, figuring out who has to pay for the replacement Green Card. Now, sometimes USPS will try a delivery and fail at that deliver, and so your Green Card might actually be stuck at your local post office. That's actually a good thing. What you want to avoid or hope to avoid is them sending it back to USCIS because USCIS will sit on it for a while and then I think they destroy it. It's certainly gone and certainly not able to be recaptured.
So if USPS still has it, your best bet is to talk to your mailman or your mail lady and ask them for help in tracking that down. They might be able to point you in the right direction. You can go to your local USPS office, that's the post office.
If the card gets send back to USCIS, there is a method by which you can request it to come back. What I would do is, if I figured out that the post office sent it back to USCIS, then I would contact USCIS and see if they can resend it. I think they'll try it one time.
And then, finally, if it was your mistake and you just gave them the bad address, it's very unlikely you're going to find that Green Card. At that point then, you're left having to file for a replacement Green Card, and this is where I was discussing whose fault is it. Because, whether or not you have to pay the replacement fee for your I-90... The I-90 is the form that you submit to get a replacement Green Card. The question of who pays for the replacement Green Card is impacted by whose mistake it was. If it was your mistake, you're going to have to pay for the replacement Green Card. It's not as much as the Green Card application itself, but it's definitely not something you want to pay if you can avoid it.
If it was the post office's fault or USCIS's fault, then you can probably get them to pay for it, or at least not charge you is what I mean. And so you're going to need to really do that legwork that I mentioned to track down where it is, not just to see if you can find the Green Card, but also to see if you can get them to pay for it. So these are the important things you need to consider. You would then file an I-90, and then there's a box to check if it's their fault or your fault, and whether or not you're paying the fee.
Now, of course, they're always going to default that it's your fault. They're always going to blame you. They're always going to try to get out of responsibility and they're always going to try to collect that I-90 filing fee, the replacement card Green Card fee. So you might have a battle on your hands. If you've lost your Green Card or if someone else has lost your Green Card, give us a call. 314-961-8200. You can email us at [email protected]. Be sure to join us in our Facebook group, which is called Immigrant Home. If you like this video, we ask you please share it out on social and be subscribed to our YouTube channel so that you get updates whenever we make videos just like this one. Thanks a lot and have a great day.
