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Last Time You Contacted the State Dept

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What happens if a year goes by and I haven't communicated with the embassy.

Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States out of our office here in Saint Louis, Missouri. When you are dealing with the State Department, if more than one year goes by and you do not contact the embassy, they may deem your application abandoned and we see this come up in various scenarios.

Sometimes people just stop paying attention to their case and they receive even a notification that if they don't contact the embassy or the National Visa Center, that their case will be closed. But more often, what we see is people have not updated their address with the State Department or their email address and they move or they just stopped paying attention to the case.

We've seen cases where the priority data is many, many years ago the case was on file for a really long time, but then sadly because someone wasn't paying attention at the last minute, the National Visa Center deemed the person's case to be abandoned because they hadn't heard anything within 365 days. I think there's some kind of electronic counter or calendar in the department of the state system because they do seem pretty good at keeping track of when the last contact was, so they must have a system for it. But for the purposes of this video, I want to talk about situations where people are getting notices early. They've been contacting the State Department regularly and now all of a sudden they get an email saying that they haven't contacted them early.

Now of course, if you get a message like that, you want to contact the embassy or the National Visa Center right away and you want to be able to prove it, and that's the big thing, that's the whole purpose of today's video, and that is that we need to figure out when was the last time you communicated with the State Department... and how do we prove it? That's the most important thing.

We need to have proof that you contacted the State Department. It could be screenshots, it could be email return replies. You need to do something that demonstrates that you've contacted them with the last year. Also, you needed to keep track yourself as to when was the last time you contacted them. So on your own calendar, if you are interacting with the State Department, you want to keep track of your interactions and make sure you know when the last time was you spoke to them.

Like I said, most importantly when can we prove that you talked to them. So that's what we're talking about today in this video, I want to make sure that you are protected, that you keep your case going, that you don't lose your priority date, that you don't have to start over. Really make sure that you don't let too much time go by.

Generally, you want to be fast on your end. There's plenty of delay at the State Department and you don't want any more delay to be on your end. Really, there's no reason why a case should go by a year without them hearing from you, and this is when the case is active.

I'm not talking about situations where the case was approved at USCS and the priority date isn't current. I'm talking about when your case is active, you need to be actively communicating with them yourself. I hope you found this video helpful.

If have questions about the State Department, the National Visa Center or getting a case that is stuck, unstuck, 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. If you like this video, please be sure 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.

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