News Update - February 23, 2008
By Alan Lee, Esq.†‡
U.S.C.I.S. Withdraws February 20, 2008, FBI Name Check Questions
and Answers Temporarily
U.S.C.I.S. has temporarily withdrawn the February 20, 2008, Questions
and Answers concerning the FBI name checks from its website. In
the Q&A, U.S.C.I.S. answered 10 questions concerning the policy
of which it would appear that only 3 would have answers that might
cause revision. The first is Question 5, "How many applications
for lawful permanent residence are affected by this policy change?"
in which U.S.C.I.S. stated that it is currently aware of approximately
47,000 applications for permanent residence I-485 cases that are
otherwise approvable but for the fact that an FBI check is pending.
U.S.C.I.S. may be checking its statistics further as the U.S.C.I.S.
Ombudsman's report in June 2007 identified the number of cases being
held for name checks (not only I-485s) as 329,160. The second and
third questions, # 6 and # 9, stemmed from this estimate as Question
6 is "How long will it take for U.S.C.I.S. to work through
these cases affected by the policy change?" and Question 9
is "Should customers contact U.S.C.I.S. through the 1-800 customer
service number or make an INFOPASS appointment to visit their local
office if they believe their application meets the criteria of this
new policy?" To those questions, U.S.C.I.S. replied that it
anticipated the majority of cases would be processed by mid-March
2008, and recommended that customers wait until mid-March before
inquiring about cases affected by the policy modification. Although
we do not claim to be accurate prognosticators, we believe that,
when reissued on the U.S.C.I.S. website, the questions and answers
will modify the responses to one or more of these questions.
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