What's the latest on the coronavirus?
Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States out of our office here in St. Louis, Missouri. We are filming this video on Monday, April 13th, 2020, and I just wanted to give you a short rundown of what we're seeing at USCIS and the State Department.
It seems that most embassies across the world have a closed for visa processing. I believe that the employees that work at those various embassies are still working, but they're not taking a face-to-face interviews, and so visas aren't being issued. So, we believe this will continue for several more weeks at least, if not longer. And so, embassy cases are pretty much on hold.
At the National Visa Center, which is where you start your case with the State Department, those cases are still being processed, but we have seen a bit of a slow down. We've been waiting on some case receipts for cases that were transferred from USCIS after an approval, and we're not seeing those get processed right on time at the National Visa Center.
So, at USCIS itself, there was a outbreak at the Vermont Service Center last week, and so they're closed for a few more days while everything gets cleaned up. And so, I think just generally you're going to be seeing a slowdown across the board.
They are still receipting cases and that's true at USCIS and for our lawsuits. So, the federal courts are still open, we're still being able to file our lawsuits, and we are proceeding full steam ahead. So, there hasn't been a lot of guidance from USCIS, they've been pretty silent except to say their blanket statements that they're closed for public facing activities up through early May. And we will see how that continues to go.
Now, we have been getting a lot of questions about the coronavirus, and how that's going to impact immigrants, both immigrants who are here in the United States, immigrants who are outside the United States. So, we went ahead and prepared a special report for immigrants in the coronavirus age, and so you can download that for free at our website.
We're going to put the link down below, so you should be able to download that report and, hopefully, it'll answer all of your questions. If you have special coronavirus related questions, leave them in the notes below. If you have any kind of questions, just let us know. You can always call us at 314-961-8200. You can email us at [email protected].
Be sure to join us in our Facebook group, that's where we released the report first. That Facebook group is called Immigrant Home and we have a lot of good immigration news and discussions in there. And if you liked this video, please be sure to share it out on social, and to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so that you get updates whenever we make videos just like this one. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.
