Where Is My Immigration File? Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our offices in St. Louis, San Diego, and Washington D.C. When you file a USCIS application, it typically is filed at a USCIS lockbox. From there, it is processed and sent along to a service center. If it's a case that involves an interview, then your case will eventually be sent to the local field office. So let's take a hypothetical example. We have a guy, Rafin, he lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. He applies for naturalization and he sends it off to the USCIS lockbox. Let's say it's the one in Chicago. It is opened up by contractors. It is assigned a case number. His information is scanned into the system. His check is cashed, and the case is sent on its way to the National Service Center or to another service center for processing.
Eventually, his case will be set for interview at the local field office in Minneapolis, which is right across from St. Paul. During that time, from the time that he files until the time that his case is set for interview, people spend an incredible amount of time worrying about where their case is. "Which service center is it at? Has it reached the field office yet?" I think you can just let all that stuff go. I think that's completely wasted energy. I think living and dying based on electronic alerts that you receive about where your case is, I mean, number one, I don't think the information that they provide is even accurate. I think a lot of the times they'll tell you that your case is one place but it's actually somewhere else. You might think that your case is at a office that has a slow processing time, and that might stress you out.
There's really no value in living and dying on the whims of an electronic alert from a federal government bureaucracy. I've seen too many people stress themselves out, pull their hair out, get upset, get sad. It really doesn't do any good. So who cares where your case is? It doesn't matter. All that matters is when your case is set for interview. There's nothing you can do about it. You can't do anything to get them to send it to another service center. You can't make that request. They do what they want. And so you can either fight it or you can just go along for the ride.
Now, of course, if it gets way, way, way too long, way too delayed, then you can talk about suing them or doing other things to try to move your case along. But for the most part, for those eight or nine months where your case is just pending, you do yourself no favors by spending all that time banging your head on the wall wondering where your case is and why no one's working on it. The fact is that it's a big bloated bureaucracy that does move very slowly. If you accept that fact and spend your time instead of crying about where your case is, if you spend your time getting ready for your interview and studying for your test or whatever, then your time is going to be much better well spent. So please give yourself that gift. Please let go of that frustration.
And if you need help with your immigration case, please give us a call 314-961-8200. Email us [email protected]. Be sure to join us on our Facebook group, which is called Immigrant Home. If you like this video, we ask that you please share it out on social and that you subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you get updates whenever we make videos just like this one. Don't forget most Tuesdays and Thursdays you'll find me live in our Facebook group around noon Central and also on our YouTube channel answering as many of your immigration law related questions as possible. Thanks a lot, and we'll see you on the next video.
