We're going to talk about the Infopass. Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our office here in St. Louis, Missouri. I have my trusty sidekick Adele here. She runs our office and she's run all the immigration work that we've done in this firm since we started, and I wanted to have Adele on as a guest for the video because we're having questions lately about the Infopass appointment. Now the Infopass appointment used to be great. Why don't you tell everybody about what the Infopass used to be like?
So you'd get to schedule an Infopass online and just show up at any time you pick, or even if you don't schedule Infopass, they had like a little monitor set up outside in front of the immigration doors on the second floor and you just schedule it yourself and then go and talk to usually Connie or whoever is there at the front and ask your questions. And they tend to give you not good legal advice sometimes. But for the most part, they tried to help you figure out where your case is.
So it wasn't a perfect system, but it did allow us to communicate actually with the immigration officers in the office. We might be able to pass a note or get some kind of information to them. I mean, they let us drop off packets in person. It was great. It helped a lot of people. Yeah, and so now the Trump administration has basically shut down Infopass. It made it almost impossible. Â So I think if I'm not mistaken, they completely took it off in St. Louis, it's not throughout the US, that doesn't apply just St. Louis right now.
No, most offices, most offices have done away with Infopass. So now you can't really do it online. You can't schedule it. You can do a service request online, but it's not really helpful. Usually I get no results when I do those. Sometimes I get results within like 30, 40 days, I'll hear something or else I'm bugging them every 30 days and doing it online. If someone wants to actually file an Infopass now, what has to happen in order for that to actually occur? So the first thing you do, you called the 1-800 number and ask for a second teir supervisor and then they will try to schedule an Infopass for you.
Yeah. But it's like totally within their discretion now. It's like in the old days, if you wanted to do an Infopass, you got to set it. Now you have to basically get permission and a lot of times it involves callbacks and long wait periods. I mean, you'll call it early in the morning during like their busy time and be on hold forever. Then get someone, then they transfer you to a supervisor, second tier supervisor, and usually they're unavailable and then they'll schedule you for a call back. And so you have to sit next to your phone forever.
Yeah. And then a lot of times they just say no, no Infopass. We have a lot of people that lose their green cards through the mailing system. And so a lot of our clients are calling the 1-800 number for that purpose, and they're not very helpful. They say, "Here's this UPS tracking number, figure it out." And so they kind of are stuck.
Yeah, so long and short it is for those asking in the immigrant home Facebook group about the Infopass, it's basically dead. We don't rely on it much anymore. You're going to have to follow things up with federal express, you're going to have to really fight for things, and some things have just become impossible to deal with because you can't get anyone's attention and getting someone on the one ... I mean, of course now with Infopass closing the 1-800 number is also backlogged, so you're experiencing delays across the board. And the one thing I always like to say is that's a design feature. That's not a glitch. That's what they want to happen. They're trying to make life harder for immigrants and by doing it with Infopass, that's one of the ways they've made their lives harder, and frankly our lives.
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