USCIS is trying harder to deny you. Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our offices in St. Louis, Missouri and San Diego, California. In today's video, we're going to talk about what we've been seeing lately in our office with some marriage cases. We've seen more denials and more Notices of Intent to Deny. And most importantly, more site visits than we've ever seen before. In the last few months, our office has received and observed a lot more denials than we usually get. And these are people that are either hiring us or people that hire us to file lawsuits or people that are just consulting with us. We've seen USCIS taken a much more aggressive approach in how they handle these cases. We have received denial notices that are 10 or 12 or 15 pages long, and they are very methodical, very detailed, very well-developed facts.
And what they do is they point out all of the inconsistencies between your testimony and your spouse's testimony. And these are marriage-based cases that we're talking about. We're seeing this time and time again, where they really harp on discrepancies between the petitioner and the beneficiary. So for instance I saw one, they asked, "How did you get to the place where you got married?" And one person said, "We took a car that I drove," and the other person said, "Somebody drove us." So we're seeing this over and over and over lately. And so you really need to be concerned about this. I think this is something that's a real concern and something that's really going to hurt some people's chances of getting an immigration benefit. Now, I will say that I believe that they sort of target people who don't have a lot of money. And it seems to me that they've really focused on people of lower economic means, and that these are where they're really going over the top to deny people.
They're also going after people, where the non-citizen came on a visa and overstayed. So, we're seeing much more scrutiny from USCIS. We're seeing them show up at people's houses or apartments, talking to the landlord, looking at all the documents regarding who lives there. They're knocking on doors and talking to neighbors. These are all things that they used to do rarely, and now they're doing them regularly. So obviously, if you have a legitimate marriage, you shouldn't be worried about any kind of proper inspection, but there is a line there between sort of the totally fake cases and the 100% slam dunk cases. There's an area there in between in which I think some people can get caught. And so people say all the time, "Jim, we can fix this later, right? We don't have to have the strongest case possible. And we might hire you if we need you later on down the line." That's the wrong approach. The right approach is to submit as much evidence as you can to overwhelm them with evidence.
And so when we take over a case at the beginning, we really push our clients to give us as much documents as possible. I was talking to a newly married couple yesterday about getting them ready to file their case. And you really sometimes have to put the fear of God in your clients to make sure that they understand the severity and the importance of this. I'll probably take some of these denials and sort of get the language out of them just so that people can see. Obviously, we would make it all anonymous, but so that you can see what these denials look like. I mean, in all honesty, they're works of art. They're much stronger than the denials we used to see. We used to see USCIS just slap things together, but now they're actually going through and really pushing clients. And of course, I don't want any fake marriage to get approved. I don't want anybody who's lying or perpetrating an immigration fraud to get an immigration benefit. And in fact, I get really mad when I come across those people because they make life harder for all the people with legitimate marriages.
So, there are some people who think that you only need an immigration lawyer when you have a fake marriage. And of course, that's not the case at all. We handle 100s of marriage-based green card cases every day. And the vast, vast, vast majority of them are legitimate. And if we find out that someone is perpetrating a fraud, we withdraw immediately. So if you have questions about this, or if you're worried about your marriage-based green card case or a site visit to your house, give us a call at (314) 961-8200. You can email us at [email protected]. Be sure to join us in our Facebook group that's called Immigrant Home. We'd love to have you join us there. We also have a great YouTube channel that you should subscribe to. That way, whenever I make a new video, you'll get alerted to it right away. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we're live in our Facebook group and on the YouTube channel answering as many of your immigration questions as we can, usually at 12 noon, like I said, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.
