Marla

Hello fellow AOS seekers--

I just wanted to post our experience filing for AOS at the Sacramento
sub-office on December 27, 2002. My fiance (UK citizen) arrived in
the US on a tourist visa waiver in September, and married me (US
citizen) in November.

We had read on another site that we should arrive early, as the
Sacramento office only processes 15 AOS applications per day. We
dutifully arose at 3am and arrived at 5:20, expecting to be 10th in
line. In reality, the only ones there ahead of us were a multitude of
crows asleep in the trees above. The next human did not arrive until
sixish. For a while we were afraid we'd gone to the wrong building,
or at least the wrong door!

At 7am we were the first ones admitted into the building. We procured
a ticket from a woman who looked remarkably like a caricature of the
Queen of England (and a very miserable one at that), and went into a
large waiting room that looked like a cross between a courtroom and a
prison holding cell, with the added luxury of church pew-like seating.
A lone television blasted out a grainy rendition of "Toy Story" for
our amusement. We handed in our I-485, I-130, I-864, I-765 and two
I-325A's right away, being first in the room, but we had to wait until
8am to pay the cashier, after which we thought we could go home. To
our surprise, the cashier told us to sit back down and wait, because
an officer would be calling us again. Dumbfounded, we did as we were
told without asking the reason. Thus, we waited until 10 with no clue
of what we were waiting for or why. I told my husband that it was an
adventure, and we should be excited to get our first taste of being
oppressed by the inhuman bureaucratic apparatus that is the INS. So
anyway we waited, unimpressed by the on-screen exploits of Buzz and
Woody, until we were finally called along with about five other
individuals WHO ARRIVED AFTER WE DID, at which point we were given a
little scrap of paper (which suspiciously resembled a cash register
receipt) and told to go wait somewhere else. My husband, too
impatient to remain a mindless pawn of the system, asked, "And we're
waiting for.....?" The bored voice replied, "Employment
authorization."

Ah, so our waiting had a purpose after all. We followed instructions
and had been sitting in the other room for over an hour when--can you
believe this?--the fire alarm went off, and the building had to be
evacuated. Now, if there had been a fire or a bomb threat I could
certainly understand this; but what had in fact emptied the building
was a BROKEN WATER PIPE in the restroom on the fifth floor. Naturally
this had to be repaired before we were allowed to return a half hour
later and....continue waiting.

Finally, after a very vocal Latina woman (bless her soul) complained
about the total lack of activity in the EAD processing room, my
husband was called in to have his photo taken, and we walked out with
his EAD in hand a few minutes later. I had read that INS offices were
not processing same-day EADs anymore due to a recent internal memo,
but in our case that wasn't true.

We went to the Social Security office and applied for his SSN, and boy
did it feel good!!!!

Thanks to everyone who posts here; we got a lot of valuable advice
from this group. Anyone who has questions about our experience can
e-mail me. We still have the interview to get through, of course, but
it feels like we've made a big step forward.

Best,
Marla and Angel

leszke.1

Marla and Angel -

I liked your (VERY entertaining, funny and intelligent) rendition of your AOS experiences at the INS in Sacramento.

I'm in the same situation as yourselves - except about 10 steps behind and I really don't know whether I'm coming or going and I'm getting quite upset by it all.

Would you be able to post me your email address so I can correspond with you????? My email address is:-

[email protected]

Sincerely hoping to hear from you,

Karen
(UK Citizen in USA on Visa Waiver - and extremely attached to a certain US Citizen!!!) Help.................

jeninifer

What a great story, but I'm a little irritated to know that this was an option!

My husband arrived in the US for a visit in March. On the way home from the airport we were discussing our options, etc. and decided to just go ahead and get married. We got engaged at Christmas and the only thing that we would lose by marrying earlier was the grand wedding with all the bells and whistles - and at that point we didn't care!

So we hired an attorney to handle the paperwork for us. It seemed like it took her a lifetime and then when she did file she sent in the wrong fees! After that we waited several weeks for the infamous "receipt" to come in the mail so we could drive three hours to Indianapolis to get Philip's work authorization.

If I'd have only known how simple it would have been to do ourselves... and that we could have done it all in one day!? I guess that's the way it goes.

We're up for our AOS interview on January 14th. Wish us luck!

Caro

Not all offices allow walk-ins for filing. This was, for example, not an option in Detroit, and all applications had to be sent by mail. Good luck for the interview, wish you the best.

Caroline

Caro

I had my EAD also renewed same say in San Francisco last friday. Just like you, I was very surprised because of the memo, but didn't complain

Caroline