A Happy Ending for a Family

Yesterday, our office received an email from the U.S. State Department National Visa Center regarding an old case going back to 1991. It contains the fee bills for the affidavit of support and immigrant visas of the daughter and her family of one of our clients. I am sure our client will be very happy to pay these bills. This email marks the beginning of a happy ending for a Filipino family’s re-union.

The story began in November of 1991. Our client, whom we would call Mrs. S., was a lawful permanent resident of the United States. She was not our client at that time. As a green card holder, she filed two family immigrant visa petitions on behalf of her daughter and his son under the F2B category. When the petitions were filed, they were both single. In June 1996, Mrs. S applied for naturalization and became a U.S. citizen after having been a legal resident for five years.

In about 1998, visa numbers were available for both petitions, and her children were notified to pay the visa fees and file additional documents to apply for an immigrant visa. Her son remained single at that time and was able to successfully immigrate to the U.S. as a lawful permanent resident in 2000. Mrs. S’s daughter, for better or worse, was married in November of 1996 to nice gentleman, and two healthy sons were born of this marital union. Both Mrs. S and her daughter did not understand the significance of the marriage. Under the U.S. immigration laws, the marriage changed the daughter’s preference category as she was no longer an “unmarried daughter” of a lawful resident. When the daughter presented her marriage certificate to the National Visa Center, she was told that her visa petition was no longer valid and the case would not be continued.

It would have been the end of the story but for the fact that Mrs. S had already become a U.S. citizen. More importantly, she actually became a citizen a few months before her daughter was married. This made a significant difference under the U.S. immigration law because the naturalization allowed Mrs. S to covert her visa petition for her daughter to the F3 category – married sons and daughters of U.S. citizen. Had she become naturalized after her daughter’s marriage, this conversion would not have been possible. Why is the conversion so important? The reason is that the conversion would allow Ms. S to keep the priority date for the original petition from 1991 without having to re-file a new petition on behalf of her daughter. Given the long waiting time for visa numbers, the difference could be 10 or more years! After speaking to some attorneys, Mrs. S actually understood the issue and but was unable to make the conversion work for her. When she was about to give up hope she hired our office in 2007. At that time, her daughter’s sons were already 6 and 9 years old in the Philippines.

After understanding the case history and conducting some initial investigation, we explained to Mrs. S that the problem here is not only a legal issue but more a logistic and procedural one. Although Mrs. S legally should be able to pursue this petition for her daughter, the problem lies at the age of the petition. Mrs. S attempted to contact the National Visa Center but was told that the case file was already returned to the former INS. This is normal as the NVC does not keep inactive case files. Unfortunately, Mrs. S filed her petition with a location INS office in 1991 which at that time was not as automated and computerized as today. After several attempts of contacting the current USCIS office, a supervisor agreed to investigate the case. Unfortunately after a thorough search based on the case information that we have, the result was still that a case file was not found for the original petition. Although it seemed that we had come to another dead-end, both Mrs. S and I did not want to give up. We gathered additional documents from Mrs. S including an old payment receipt for the filing of the original petitions. With all available information, we requested the government to create a duplicate file. This supervisor was very responsible and finally agreed to make it happen. The file was created in time before the daughter’s visa category became current. It was finally forwarded to the State Department National Visa Center for the processing of the immigrant visas. Very soon, not only will Mrs. S be able to be re-united with her daughter, she would also be able to live with her s