Case approved, no visa yet. Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our offices in San Diego, California and St. Louis, Missouri. Case approved, case approved, case approved. I'll believe it when I see it. I don't believe them when they say a case is approved. The only thing that matters is, do you have your visa? Is it in your passport? Is your passport in your possession and are you ready to come to the United States? Anything else short of that is not an approval. I don't care what they call it, I don't care what the online portal says, I don't care what the embassy official tells you, I don't care what the USCIS officer tells you. If you don't have the benefit in hand, if you don't have your green card, if you haven't been sworn in to become a citizen, if you haven't received your passport with the visa stamp in there saying you can come to the United States between these dates, you have not been approved.
I don't care what it says online, and you shouldn't either. People get all ... I mean, I understand people getting excited when their case has been noted approved, but we had someone in the immigrant home Facebook group the other day asking us, "Jim, my case was approved three months ago, but I don't have a visa." Well, then in reality, your case wasn't approved. They might have said online that it was approved, but that's not anything that you can take to the bank. That's not something that you can get on a plane with, and that's what we're talking about. Do I have the benefit? Do I actually have the benefit in hand? You either do, or you don't. And if you don't, then the case is not over, you do not have the benefit, and you're still waiting. They can categorize it, they can title it, they can call it whatever they want, but if you don't have the document that you want, the document that you applied for, the document to which you are entitled, your case hasn't been approved. It hasn't been finally approved, and it's of no legal importance.
That's the thing. Can you take advantage of this benefit? That's the standard. And so don't get all hung up on approvals. Now, if you have a case that's been allegedly approved, and they say that it's approved but nothing has happened and months have gone by, you're probably going to need to talk to a lawyer about suing them, because that doesn't compute. If the case was approved, the visa should have been issued. If the case was approved, the green card or the nationalization should have occurred. So if you're in a situation where something or someone has told you that your case has been approved, but you don't have the benefit and months and months have gone by like this poor person in Immigrant Home, then you're going to need to talk to a lawyer because you're probably going to need to sue them because something's not right in their system.
I have seen plenty of people who've been told their cases were approved, that lasted and waited years for that. And so this happens more often than you would think. You'd think that would be very strange that the case could say it was approved and the person doesn't receive the benefit. Something's wrong in that scenario, and you probably need to get some help to look at it and to fix it.
If you have questions about this, or about what the status of your case is, give us a call (314) 961-8200. You can email us [email protected]. Be sure to join us in our Facebook group, which is called Immigrant Home. Make sure that you subscribe to our YouTube channel and that you join us every Tuesday and Thursday, usually at noon central, where I'm answering as many immigration law related questions, just like this one. And we hope to see in there. Thanks a lot, and have a great day.
