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Hello everyone. We have a frustrating situation and are asking ourselves if our lawyer is incompetent and if she is avoiding taking responsibility for the delays we have experienced in the processing of my wife's Green card.
To make a long story short, me (US citizen) and my Canadian wife were living intermittently in Morocco and were there when we submitted the I 130 application. When we submitted it we used the Moroccan address. A few months later, I took up a job offer and moved back to the US while my wife returned to Canada. I informed USCIS of my new address in the US and forgot to have the attorney update my wifes address from the Moroccan one to the current Canadian one. Fast forward a year, and we finally get a letter stating that the file has been approved and is moving to the NVS for further processing, and that our interview will be in the US consulate in Casablanca.
We were shocked and realized that the attorney forgot/failed to update my wife's address. We are fairly certain that is why we waited an extraordinarily long time for the file to be moved the NVS (from filing the I 130 to the approval was 17 months!).
We voiced our concern to the lawyer and she dodged the issue and insisted that she needed to keep the old address. She said in an email:
[I]"n my professional judgment, I properly provided your address to the immigration authorities on your paperwork. Any omission on my part of your extensive time in Morocco as a living address would have been, and would be now, in my view, a misrepresentation that not only would have prejudiced your case significantly, but also would be a breach of ethics on my part."
We feel that the fact that paper work was not checked correctly and my wife's address was not updated until May 2018 has caused the huge delay in the acceptance of the petition. Since December 2017 till we received the notice about interview on June 7, 2019, the USCIS office was under the impression that my wife was a Canadian residing in Morocco; hence it would take them longer to verify information before giving their approval.
As far as we are concerned there are only two possibilities here: either the lawyer neglected to change the address upon my wife's return to Canada or the lawyer purposely left it without updating the information. It's one thing for them to do their background checks in Canada, but throw in another country that they think I'm living in, and that's untold delays upon an already lengthy and frustrating process.
When we expressed this in an email, the lawyer's response was: "I did not neglect or purposely neglect updating your file. Your information is properly updated with immigration and Department of State."
Furthermore, we have had to correct the documents half a dozen times (misspellings of our children's names, incorrect entries for country of birth), and we sent an incorrect document that she sent to NVS that WE later discovered was the wrong document (the lawyer didn't even look over it).
We are all in favor of due diligence, but are we wrong in thinking that this lawyer has dropped the ball way too many times and refuses to acknowledge her errors?
What say you all? Thankfully, we are now at the final stage and waiting to get the interview date, and we don't require the lawyer's "services" anymore, but we feel she has been negligent and left most of the work for us to do, and her failure to update information has resulted in extra delays.
Thank you!
P.S. She also had us scrambling to get police reports from countries my wife lived in over the years, and we discovered that we didn't need to because the stays were never six months consecutively.
To make a long story short, me (US citizen) and my Canadian wife were living intermittently in Morocco and were there when we submitted the I 130 application. When we submitted it we used the Moroccan address. A few months later, I took up a job offer and moved back to the US while my wife returned to Canada. I informed USCIS of my new address in the US and forgot to have the attorney update my wifes address from the Moroccan one to the current Canadian one. Fast forward a year, and we finally get a letter stating that the file has been approved and is moving to the NVS for further processing, and that our interview will be in the US consulate in Casablanca.
We were shocked and realized that the attorney forgot/failed to update my wife's address. We are fairly certain that is why we waited an extraordinarily long time for the file to be moved the NVS (from filing the I 130 to the approval was 17 months!).
We voiced our concern to the lawyer and she dodged the issue and insisted that she needed to keep the old address. She said in an email:
[I]"n my professional judgment, I properly provided your address to the immigration authorities on your paperwork. Any omission on my part of your extensive time in Morocco as a living address would have been, and would be now, in my view, a misrepresentation that not only would have prejudiced your case significantly, but also would be a breach of ethics on my part."
We feel that the fact that paper work was not checked correctly and my wife's address was not updated until May 2018 has caused the huge delay in the acceptance of the petition. Since December 2017 till we received the notice about interview on June 7, 2019, the USCIS office was under the impression that my wife was a Canadian residing in Morocco; hence it would take them longer to verify information before giving their approval.
As far as we are concerned there are only two possibilities here: either the lawyer neglected to change the address upon my wife's return to Canada or the lawyer purposely left it without updating the information. It's one thing for them to do their background checks in Canada, but throw in another country that they think I'm living in, and that's untold delays upon an already lengthy and frustrating process.
When we expressed this in an email, the lawyer's response was: "I did not neglect or purposely neglect updating your file. Your information is properly updated with immigration and Department of State."
Furthermore, we have had to correct the documents half a dozen times (misspellings of our children's names, incorrect entries for country of birth), and we sent an incorrect document that she sent to NVS that WE later discovered was the wrong document (the lawyer didn't even look over it).
We are all in favor of due diligence, but are we wrong in thinking that this lawyer has dropped the ball way too many times and refuses to acknowledge her errors?
What say you all? Thankfully, we are now at the final stage and waiting to get the interview date, and we don't require the lawyer's "services" anymore, but we feel she has been negligent and left most of the work for us to do, and her failure to update information has resulted in extra delays.
Thank you!
P.S. She also had us scrambling to get police reports from countries my wife lived in over the years, and we discovered that we didn't need to because the stays were never six months consecutively.
