Denied! Part I: Department of Homeland Security v My Wife
on September 11, 2007 at 12:00 amThe Department of Homeland Security, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, tells us that my wife graduated in July.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
This would be fantastic news, as she travels to her laboratory daily to finish her thesis on radio frequency identification technologies. I could have sworn that she wasn’t graduating until December, especailly as it today we both filed our applications for advanced degrees with the University of Nebraska – Lincoln today.
The relevant portion of their letter reads
A review of your application, all supporting documents submitted and the SEVIS System indicates that your course of study ended July 13, 2007. However, your Application for Employment Authorization was not received until July 18, 2007. Because your application was received after the completion of your course of study you are ineligible for employment authorization under (c)(3)(i). Therefore, upon consideration, it is ordered that this application be denied. There is no appeal to this decision.
This is relating to the non-immigrant application to work, not the immigration “family reunification” visa that would allow my wife to become a permanent resident. Still, quire annoying, and angering.
I’m still trying to determine the chain of screw-ups that led to their letter of “September 06, 2007″ (postmarked September 10, and received by us on the 11th). More posts, I assume, to follow.
All this just serves to heighten my paranoia regarding our fiance visa request in the pipeline… I hope that somehow you can talk to someone (perhaps via your school?) who can set this straight because you never know when letting a gov't snafu stand will come back to haunt you in the future.
Hot damn! If you can't appeal… what does that leave? Reapplying?
No appeal? Sheesh. You may have to get your Congressman's office involved. The gov't is so stupid sometimes. Rejecting applications is the path of least resistance for someone with a large backlog of cases to complete. Too bad some terminally lazy doofus was handling your wife's case. Good luck!
Brendan,
We snuck the first application under the deadline, so it only cost us $180. The new fees are $300+. Assuming processing time takes as long the second time around, the OPT visa would come at about the same time as the permanent residency. *sigh*
Mystery,
I wonder about the bureaucracy… We had contacted Congress just a bit ago. [1] Part of me wonders if this was a “go over are heads, will you” retaliation by some punk bureaucrat…
Eddie,
Get a lawyer. Everything we have used our lawyer [2] for has either gone through or, when some paperwork was lost by USCIS, he sent it back in right away. The OPT was the only thing we trusted UNL with, because they handle it all the time. Ha!
One irony of all of this is if not for the 1-week dead paper time (between the envelope being received by USCIS and processed), we would have been under their imaginary deadline.
[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2007/08/27/constiuent-services.html
[2] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2007/07/18/last-of-the-paperwork.html