Is USCIS being even more aggressive in denying cases?
Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our office here in St. Louis, Missouri. As you know, we're members of the American Immigration Lawyers' Association, and one of the benefits of being a member of AILA is that you get these email updates from time to time when they're starting to see trends, or when our members are reporting back to the organization that USCIS is up to some new, dirty tricks.
Now, back in 2018, USCIS put out a memo that said that if a case is not facially valid, in other words, if you submit a case and there's something fundamentally wrong with it, or if you've made a mistake, you've omitted, let's say a divorce decree, or you haven't checked certain boxes, that they're going to start being more aggressive, and they'll receive it, cash the check, and then they'll just deny it outright.
And we have just started seeing this come into play in our own office, where people come to see us and they say, "Jim, I just filed, I thought I filed everything right. And they cash my checks, which aren't insubstantial. They could be, you can pay up to $1,600 in just filing fees and they are receiving it, keeping the money, and then finding a technicality to deny your case. And this is all based on a memo that came out in 2018.
So you need to be really careful with what you file. Now, more than ever, you are at threat to having a very unfair treatment of your application. And so you might want to think about working with an immigration lawyer. I mean, even at our office, we're doing everything we can to try to make sure that every box is checked.
We've heard of people getting denials because they didn't put not applicable in some boxes. So it's really getting ridiculous. Of course, this is all on purpose.
So if you are thinking of applying for an immigration benefit, you really need to make sure that everything is done properly because now they're really trying to screw immigrants and the way that they do that as they keep your money and deny your case. So we don't want that to happen to you. We don't want that to happen to our clients.
We don't want that to happen to anybody. So if you have questions about filing a stronger case, or making sure your case complies with all the USCIS regulations and statutes, 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. And if you like this video, we ask you please share it out on social and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.
