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Where's my damn interview notice?
Hi, I’m Jim Hacking, an immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States out of our office here in St. Louis, Missouri, and our office in San Diego, California. Our new San Diego office is right upstairs from USCIS. Yes, we’re very excited about this fact, and I’ll be out there in about a week to handle our first case in San Diego. It was so great. We opened our office on January 4th, and Andrew Boomer from our office signed up for two naturalization interviews that I’m going to attend towards the end of January. And we’re very excited about that, and it’s so exciting because I’ll get to go to the office, and then I’ll just go downstairs on a leisurely elevator ride down to USCIS. So that is pretty exciting. And for us here in St. Louis, we’re pretty far from the USCIS office, so that’ll be a real game-changer, I think, for us.
All right. So, in any event, let’s get to today’s question. And it comes from [Juma 00:01:01]. Juma says that USCIS updated his application notification seven months ago and told him that his case is ready to be scheduled for an interview. However, he has not received his interview notice. Now we’ve been seeing this more and more. Now, of course, if you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know that I don’t put much stock in the online updates, but they are helpful. We do sign up for them. We advise our clients to sign up for them. People in immigration land are always starving for that little piece, that little morsel of information, and I totally get that. But Juma, sorry, is troubled by the fact that he hasn’t received his interview scheduled yet. And I totally get that.Â
You would think that if they’ve notified you electronically that your case is ready to be scheduled for an interview, your interview notice would be coming shortly after that. Now seven months is sort of on the outer edge, but we’ve seen cases take nine or 10 months from the time that the electronic alert comes and the actual physical interview notice. And, of course, it’s just another month or six weeks after you get the notice when you actually have the interview. As part of the legacy of the Trump administration and their long delays baked into immigration, this is one of the things that we are seeing. So Juma, you’re not all by yourself waiting for an interview date; you’re in company with a lot of other people who’ve all been experiencing similar things. And so I hope you don’t get too disheartened. I would think that you probably live in a very busy city, a highly populated city.
So, usually around here in St. Louis, or even in San Diego, if someone gets an interview waiver or gets electronic notice that their case has been scheduled for an interview, that notice usually comes in about five or six months. But really, in the big cities like, or the very busy immigration offices like Miami, New York, Chicago, it can be months and months. Still, I would think that you’re going to get your notice and change your case status pretty soon and hope you get ready for your interview. We have lots of videos about how to get ready for your visa interview and green card or your citizenship interview. We also have a new book coming out on everything you need to know about green cards. So hopefully, you’ll find that helpful. And hopefully, your case will get approved.
If you have any questions in the application process, give us a call at 314-325-1379, or you can email us at [email protected]. Of course, we have our Facebook group called Immigrant Home, where I got Jumas’s question out of, and we’re always happy to answer as many questions as we can.Â
So if you join us there on Tuesdays and Thursdays, usually at noon central, I’ll be answering questions there and on our YouTube channel. You should really think about subscribing to our YouTube channel. We put out a new video at least once a day, and we talk about the immigration news of the day. And if you subscribe, you get an update whenever we make a new video. So thanks for joining us and we’ll see you next time.
