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U.S.C.I.S. has temporarily withdrawn the February 20, 2008, Questions and Answers concerning the FBI name checks from its website.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.


The author is a 26+ year practitioner of immigration law based in New York City. He was awarded the Sidney A. Levine prize for best legal writing at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in 1977 and has written extensively on immigration over the past years for the ethnic newspapers, World Journal, Sing Tao, Pakistan Calling, Muhasha and OCS. He has testified as an expert on immigration in civil court proceedings and was recognized by the Taiwan government in 1985 for his work protecting human rights. His article, "The Bush Temporary Worker Proposal and Comparative Pending Legislation: an Analysis" was Interpreter Releases' cover display article at the American Immigration Lawyers Association annual conference in 2004, and his victory in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in a case of first impression nationwide, Firstland International v. INS, successfully challenged INS' policy of over 40 years of revoking approved immigrant visa petitions under a nebulous standard of proof. Its value as precedent, however, was short-lived as it was specifically targeted by the Administration in the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004.

This article © 2008 Alan Lee, Esq.

 

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