Can I lose my priority date if I update my forms?
Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States, out our office here in St. Louis, Missouri, and in our office in San Diego, California.
Today's question comes from Malcolm and it comes through our Immigrant Home Facebook group. If you haven't joined the group, you really should think about it. We have a lot of good discussions in there, a lot of nice people, and we get great questions like Malcolm's question today. The amazing thing is that you guys come up with questions that I never would have thought of. They're certainly good questions. Excellent questions and questions that need to be asked and answered. But it's so great, because I don't have to sit around and think about what videos to shoot today. I just sat down with my little note card, I went down the Immigrant Home Facebook group, and I saw what questions people had. And now I'm shooting this question for Malcolm, and for everybody else who's in this scenario.
Malcolm filed a petition for his children, and he received a priority date. After Malcolm received the receipt notice, he realized that there were some mistakes in the original application, and he wants to update it to notify USCIS. Which of course is a fine proposition. That's not a bad idea. You might want to update it at the interview, or it sounds like Malcolm wants to update it ahead of time.
What he's wondering is if he updates it to correct this mistake, will he lose that priority date? Will he, in effect, be filing all over again? Now, as long as the petition isn't fundamentally defective in that it can't be approved and it gets denied, then you would lose your priority date, but otherwise just updating your information does not affect your priority date. Your priority date is your priority date. I've never seen it changed, except for if it's denied and you have to refile. Short of that, Malcolm, you should be fine. Go ahead and update your information. Make sure that USCIS has all the correct, accurate information. We want them to be fully advised and to have all the information when they make their decision, so they can't come back later and try to take it away. You will not lose your priority date. I've never heard of such a thing, and I don't think that's anything that you need to worry about.
If you're getting ready to go through the immigration process, or if you have questions, you can give us a call at 314-961-8200. You can email us at [email protected]. You can join us in our Facebook group, which is called Immigrant Home, which I mentioned earlier. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel, which is updated every single day. We've been going strong, haven't missed a day since January 1st of 2020. And we've been having a lot of fun, making the videos and getting a lot of great engagement. We just hit one million minutes per month views. So that's pretty exciting. Every Tuesday and Thursday, you can find me live, usually at noon Central Time, in our Facebook group and on our YouTube channel, answering as many questions as I can in one hour. And finally, if you want to connect on Instagram, we're at hackinglawpracticellc.
Thanks a lot. Have a great day.
