Can I just send USCIS a letter?
Hi, I'm Jim Hacking immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States out of our office here in St. Louis, Missouri. If you've seen any of my prior videos, you know that I am not a big fan of writing letters to USCIS.
Generally, I don't want people corresponding with USCIS, unless they've been asked to do so. It's generally not a good idea to just out of the blue, write USCIS a letter. So our advice generally is to not send USCIS a letter.
But in this particular scenario, I was talking to a young man named Sammy and Sammy had made some mistakes on his I-130 and 45 applications, so he's trying to adjust status based on a recent marriage.
He looked over the application after it had been filed, and he noticed that he had made some typographical mistakes and was wondering, "Jim, should I go ahead and send a letter to USCIS?"
And of course in this scenario, when you're trying to adjust status based on marriage, you're going to have an interview. So I suppose that in an overabundance of caution, you could send a letter outlining the mistakes that you've made to USCIS, but I think that's probably overkill.
The better way to handle it is probably to write up what we call an errata sheet. That's E-R-R-A-T-A, that's what I would put at the top errata sheet.
And then I would write down the mistakes that we made, right? So I would ... if you put the wrong address, I would write down the question and then write down the answer. And then when I go to the interview, I would just hand that to the officer and say, "Look, when I went over the application, I noticed a few mistakes, and I didn't want you to be confused, so these are the right addresses, or these are the right employers."
Or whatever the mistakes were just sort of cover that.
So that way, no one's going to accuse you of trying to mislead the immigration service. I don't think sending them a letter ahead of time is very meaningful.
For the most part, I don't think that letter will ever actually catch up to the file because at first your case is at the lockbox, then it's at the national benefit center, then it's at the field office.
And I think the idea that a letter that you send is actually going to catch up to the file, conceivably it could happen, but if they haven't asked you for stuff, I think it's unlikely that you're going to get that into the file.
So it's better just to handle it at the interview and to go in confidently, say these are the mistakes that I had. Let me hand them to you and then be quiet.
So hopefully that answers the question for old Sammy. And if you have any questions about sending in a form, you can give us a call at 314-961-8200.
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Thanks a lot. Have a great day.
