When should I sue for my delayed green card? Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our offices in St. Louis, Missouri and San Diego, California. I wanted to shoot this video because we've been getting a lot of questions from people about when to sue USCIS for a delayed green card.
We've been seeing longer and longer delays, and some can be explained by the backlog created by the Trump administration and all the hurdles and so-called fraud indicators that they have to go through in reviewing each and every immigration case. But some of them are targeted at particular people from particular countries. And if your case has been pending for more than a year without an interview, I believe that you're probably going to need to sue USCIS to get them to move on your case.
Now, Mackenzie and our office told me the other day that we are up to almost 700 lawsuits, we sued them 700 times, and that's all cases. That citizenship, that's green cards, that's overseas visas, all those, we've sued them a ton, and we sued them a lot for green card delays.
Now, one area of green card delays that we've been suing a lot over lately are where someone had applied for asylum and then married a U.S. citizen. Those cases just seem to go into a black hole, and I think it's because the asylum office records are kept separate from the USCIS records, and oftentimes the immigration officer wants to see those records before they adjudicate the green card. I also think it might just send it off on a different track and sort of the system's not set up for it, so we've been seeing that more and more. But we've also been seeing delays just in everyday marriage cases. I think that if USCIS thinks that the marriage might be a little bit shaky, they'll just sit on it in the hopes that the couple will end up hating each other, get in a fight, get divorced, and then the green card will not be awarded. I think that's something that they are actively rooting for.
So if you've been waiting for your green card for more than a year, and you've haven't had your interview, I think now's the time to sue. With a change in administration I think we're going to see things move a lot faster, but there's a huge backlog at USCIS. And so one way that you can get to the front of that line at your local field office is by suing them.
So like I said, we've sued them many, many times, hundreds of times for green card delays, and we haven't had them come back for any case that's been pending for more than a year and say that was not enough time. So I've had some people in consults ask me well I don't know that I waited long enough. Now a year is probably a little bit aggressive, but anything more than a year you're going to be fine suing them. They're just going to go ahead and start working on the case, they're not going to want to fight with me in Federal Court, they'd rather just go take a look at your case, schedule it for an interview. We give them an extension to answer the lawsuit, then they conduct your interview, they issue their decision and they then go ahead and we dismiss case together now. Of course the lawsuits are no guarantee that your case is going to be approved, the lawsuits are a fast forward button. For whatever reason, your green card case is sitting up on a shelf. It might be at the service center, it might be at the field office.
If you've had your interview already and months have gone by since your interview, then that's another time to sue them. So I'm not in the business of asking them for favors. I'm not in the business of writing them letters or threatening them. I just sue them, it's the only thing that works. Nothing else really works.
So if you want to get your case moving, if you're a green card case has been pending for a long time, whether it's based on asylum or marriage or work, and you're tired of waiting, you should give us a call at (314) 961-8200. You can email us at [email protected]. You can join us in our Facebook group that's called Immigrant Home. We share a lot of good information in there every day, we'd love to have you. And also you can subscribe to our YouTube channel and get updates whenever we make videos like this one. You can also find us on Instagram @hackinglawpracticellc. And then finally of course on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12:00 to 1:00 central time we're going live in our Facebook group and on YouTube answering all of your immigration questions for free. So we'd love to see you in there if you have any questions. Give us a call otherwise, (314) 961-8200.
Peace.
