Barbara Anderson

Hi,

We had a bit of an upsetting experience at the Atlanta INS office today. We
arrived for our Green Card Interview on time and were called by an examiner
who was very professional, but he was Vietnamese and kind of difficult to
understand on some of the questions. The interview was a little nerve
wracking, but we made it through ok. He took my husband's fingerprints and
signature for the green card, but then said he was sorry but he had received
a memo this morning saying all the green cards were being denied. Then he
corrected himself and said "no green cards today. Too bad you weren't here
yesterday, you would have got the stamp". Philip and I were both shocked.
The inspector then said that we could come back for the stamp in about 7-10
days and that he would call us to let us know when.

I was very upset by this as we didn't really understand what this memo meant
or anything. The inspector didn't seem to want to give us details of the
memo, so we were very concerned as to what the problem could be.

So I called our congressman's office and got the immigration liason on the
phone. She sent us back to the INS office to speak with public relations.
It seems that up until today, people who had fingerprints taken, but the
results had not come in could still be given the green card stamp, at the
inspector's discresion. But as of today, the fingerprint results must be in
the file or else you don't get your stamp. If the inspector gives you the
stamp without the fingerprint results, he/she can be fired, per the public
relations officer.

I asked the public relations man what we were supposed to do now because
Philip's Advance Parole was expired and his EAD expires in about 2 weeks.
He told us it was our own fault they expired. So we told him that we had
send in the renewals for both AP and EAD about 3 months ago and we produced
our filing receipts. He didn't have much to say after that, but he took us
over to the EAD room and told them to make Philip and new EAD and he had the
room next door make Philip new AP documents. This was something of a relief
since we are a 4 hour drive from Atlanta. However, we are wondering now
when the fingerprint results might be in and when we might actually get the
stamp. Has anyone else experienced this?

After all this was over, I called our congressman's office back to let the
immigration liason know what happened. She said that the green card stamp
can be given at the Birmingham, Alabama station for some people. We are to
call her when we hear from our inspector that the fingerprint results are in
and she is going to arrange for Philip to have his passport stamped in
Birmingham. Has anyone in the group gone to Birmingham for the green card
stamp before?

Of course, we are happy we passed the AOS interview and that Philip was able
to get his EAD and AP renewed today, but we are disappointed about the green
card. We are also concerned that it may be many months before those
fingerprint results are in. Does anyone in the group have encouraging news?
Or any news about this new rule? Does anyone know how long it takes
typically, for the FBI background check results to reach INS?

Thank you for your time,

Barbara and Philip