In the Land of Oz

Call me Dorothy, as I must be in the Land of Oz.

In the real world, if one pays for a product, one expects to receive the product. If one does not receive the product, then the seller is in breach of contract and is liable for damages including cost and reasonable expenses. In the real world, when one puts information on its web site and telephone recordings and asks its clients to use those systems to obtain information on the process of the products that they have purchased and the information turns out to be completely incorrect and misleading, and the person knows that the information on those systems to be unreliable but fails or unwilling to correct or change it, the person may be guilty of reckless or negligent misrepresentation.

However, in the Land of Oz where the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) preside, there is no liability and they do not care if you relied on their misleading information to your detriment. Case in point: Our office filed an application for a client in early May. Since then USCIS’ Case Status Online has been showing that the application is in process and we, the attorneys, and the client will be notified of a decision. USCIS’ processing time report shows that this type of application generally takes about 3 months. When our office filed this application with USCIS, we also filed an almost identical application for the client’s wife. The application for the client’s wife was, however, approved in mid-May and we received the benefit document in the mail. So, we thought that perhaps USCIS is processing the application for the client’s wife faster than normal and that the client’s application would be processed under regular time frame. We have been wondering why it has been taking so long for the client’s application to get processed when the wife’s application was completed within 3 weeks. However, we could not have contacted USCIS about the client’s application earlier because, until today, it was still within the processing timeframe for this type of cases.

So, three months have passed and we still received no news on the client’s application. Today, we called USCIS and after a few minutes of verbal wangling with a junior officer (when we were told that the application was still in process and that there was nothing they could do about it) we got connected to a higher level officer. Lo and behold, we were told by this higher level officer that her database is showing that the client’s application was approved in May, pretty much about the same time as the wife’s application. I asked the officer to verify that information again, as neither we nor the client has received the benefit document from USCIS. She confirmed the approval. I then asked the officer why USCIS Case Status Online is still showing that the application is in process when her internal database is showing that it was approved months ago. As I expected, she told me that the USCIS Case Status Online information is not to be relied upon as the information is not always updated. She further told me that there’s no information on her database showing that the benefit document was returned. Therefore, she assumed that the document must have been lost in the mail.

Trying to salvage the situation, I asked the officer if another benefit document can be re-issued immediately for the client. Again, as expected, she responded in the negative. She informed me that as the document was lost we must file a new application for the client. This not only means preparing a new application and paying a new filing fee, but also having the past three months wasted and probably waiting for an additional one to three months for USCIS to process a new application.

I will concede that U.S. Post Office mails are not always reliable and it is not uncommon that mails get lost. However, the situation could have been greatly mitigated were we able to get up-to-date information from either USCIS Case Status Online/telephone recordings or able to call in for an inquiry without first having to wait for the regular processing timeframe of three months to pass. Additionally, we would have been less frustrated had we been offered the reissuance of the benefit document without the need to re-file the application.

When the legacy Immigration and Naturalization Service was reorganized into three separate agencies and folded into U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) promised to improve customer services. It has been about 5 years since its formation, USCIS remains a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Its way of operation could not have survived even for one day in the real business world.