How do people screw up their address at USCIS Asylum office?
Hi, I'm Jim Hacking immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our office here in St. Louis, Missouri. Today's video is going to be short and sweet. It's a quick little message to just make sure for those people who have asylum cases pending that they notify the government of any address change.
I think most of immigrants know that if you're in the United States and you move, that within 10 days, you have to file a form called an AR-11. You file that on the USCIS website. You can do it in paper form or you can do it electronically. When you have a pending asylum case, you want to make sure that you notify the asylum office as well.
Now, in the case name, your case number will say Z, and then two letters denoting the office. If you look on Google, you can translate each of those codes. For instance, ZCH is the Chicago asylum office. ZAR is the Arlington asylum office. You're going to want to track down that address. You're going to want to notify not only USCIS of the address changed, but you also want to make sure that you formally notify USIC, the asylum office itself.
Each asylum office has a phone number. I'm sorry, it has a fax number or an email address, or they have a mailing address. You're going to want to update them. You're going to want to do that in writing.
You're going to want to make sure that you keep proof that you have notified them of that address, because what can happen is if you don't update your address with the asylum office and they send out your interview notice to your old address, even though you've updated it with USCIS, we've seen time and time again, that the asylum office sends it to the original address.
Usually with an asylum interview, you only have about two weeks or 10 days before that interview is scheduled. You're not going to have a lot of time between when USCIS asylum office sends it and when the interview actually is. That means that you're going to lose that opportunity to plan and participate perhaps in the interview itself, because it went to that wrong address because you only notified USCIS not the asylum office.
You have to do both. Notify USCIS. Notify the asylum office. Keep proof of both so that if you ever get an interview notice and you miss it, that you have proof that you notified them of the correct address and that you did everything that you were supposed to do.
If you need help notifying the asylum office or if you need help with your asylum case, 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 liked this video, we asked you to please share it out on social, so that you get updates whenever we make videos, just like this one. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.
