Well, my member of Congress helped me with a stuck immigration case. Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our office here in St. Louis, Missouri. We have consult after consult where people tell us, "Jim, my case has been pending for a really long time."
It could be a green card case, it could be a citizenship case, it could be an overseas visa case, all different kinds of cases. And sometimes people tell us, "Well, I think I'm going to hold off on suing them. I'm going to go ahead and contact my local Congressman or Congresswoman or my Senator and my Senator is going to get something taken care of."
Now I understand the costs and hassle associated with filing a lawsuit. We try to make it as simple for you as possible, but there is that cost and there is sometimes an easier, softer way and that is contacting your member of Congress.
But here's the deal. It's not like if you live in say, oh, I don't know Missouri and Roy Blunt is your Senator. So let's run the scenario. So here I am. My name's Abdul. I'm from Morocco and I've been waiting for my citizenship for two and a half years. So I call Senator Blunt's office and I say, "I need help with my immigration delay. I need help getting my citizenship case. Now I'm not a citizen so I can't vote but I really need your help."
So now Roy Blunt is going to give it to one of his constituent services people, one of his young interns who are going to have you sign a form that allows the senator's office to contact you, a CIS on your behalf, and then they're going to make an inquiry. And guess what? That inquiry is going to say the exact same thing that it said for Abdul, for our friend from Morocco. It's going to say administrative process or background check or some kind of security clearance check.
And the senator's office, you might see little blips of activity in your immigration case, but nothing is going to happen. I've yet to hear of someone saying, "Oh, my Senator got my case taken care of." If anybody thinks I'm wrong, leave me a comment below and tell me a story about how a time you are aware of that you have actual knowledge of a Senator or a Congressperson getting somebody's case resolved. It hardly ever happens.
I've never heard of it happening and I bet $10 that no one is going to be able to tell me of a real situation where it actually happened. And the reason for that is obvious. They don't care about Abdul. They don't care about people from Morocco. They care about US citizens who can vote and if you can't vote then they don't really need to listen to you.
And in fact, they have no more authority over the immigration service then you or I do. And so you're going to get a whole lot more attention by suing them then you are going to be wasting your time and it'll take months to try to go through the Congress person's office. So it's really in my mind, a total waste of time. You're going to be much better off filing a lawsuit and just don't get your hopes up. You can certainly try. T
here's no downside and of course, you could do both things at once, but at the end of the day, you're probably going to be wasting your time if you try that.
We hope this makes sense. We hope you found it helpful. If you have questions or are frustrated with the immigration process, give us a call 314-961-8200. You can email us at [email protected]. Be sure to join us in our Facebook group, and if you like this video, we ask that you subscribe to our YouTube channel and join us there and share it out on social whenever you can. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.
