How do I amend or update my USCIS application? Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our office here in St. Louis, Missouri. I have to re-shoot this video because I forgot to turn the microphone on. Hopefully it'll work this time. Today's video comes out of a chat I did in our YouTube Live forum. So, we have a lot of subscribers now on YouTube, and I've been going live more and more asking for questions or video ideas or quick problems that people are having. Sometimes people like to get on there and tell me their whole life story, but we're not able to answer those. But, we are looking for nuggets or questions that we can apply to many different situations and make a valuable video out of it. So, I liked this question. This was: if I send in my application, what should I do if I find something is missing or that I made a mistake?
And I think that's a great question. And this goes to show you that no matter how many times you review it, how many times you revise it, how many times you edit it or update your forms, that sometimes after you've sent the form in you find that you've made a mistake, something's missing. And having been a writer for a long time, writing blog posts, law journal articles, briefs, you can spend all this time looking at something over and over and over trying to make sure that it's completely error-free, and then once you've sent it in, you notice that there's a mistake. Now, this goes to one point that we always try to tell our people, and it's that you always want to make a copy of everything you send to USCIS. And you should keep that copy of what you send along with proof of receipt.
That's always going to be very important. You never know what you're going to have to prove with immigration, so it's important to keep a copy of everything. If you decide you want to hire a lawyer halfway through, that's also going to make things easier because you're going to be able to explain to the lawyer what you filed. I should probably do a whole video just on this topic. But, in this video we're talking about what happens if you realize there's a mistake. Well, if it's something minor, then I would say just bring it to the officer's attention when you go to the interview, either at the embassy or at the USCIS interview. Now, something minor would be the wrong address or somebody's date of birth wrong, or something small. Now, obviously date of birth can be important, but for the most part, if you just made a small mistake you can correct it at the interview.
If it's something major, something fatal, something that's going to make your case be denied, that's going to be a little bit trickier. In those situations, you're probably going to want to call the 1-800 number, and then you're going to want to send in an updated form or updated information to the address on the receipt notice that you received. So, whenever you file an application, you're going to get a receipt notice, and in the bottom left-hand corner will be the address of where your case is pending. You might want to check online to see if it's been updated, but otherwise you could send your update there by federal express. You want to make sure that you sent it in and that it was received, and hopefully that'll get your case updated. Now, sometimes it doesn't catch up to it. So, if you did that, I would also bring a copy to any interview so that you can show them, "Look, I tried to supplement this. I wasn't lying about anything. And here you go".
So, hopefully this is helpful. Hopefully you now know what to do. Calling that 1-800 number might be a good interim step too, just to see how they want you to handle it. And, of course, you always might think about hiring an attorney to figure out if you need their help to get your case squared away. If you have questions about this, give us a call at (314) 961-8200. You can email us at [email protected]. Be sure to join us in our Facebook group, which is called "Immigrant Home". You can also find us now on Instagram at HackinglawpracticeLLC. And, if you liked this video, we ask that you please share it out on social and that you 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.
