My mother applied for citizenship and she will have her interview within two months.
In the letter she received from USCIS they asked her to bring her Green Card and all previous passport and the last three years of Tax return.
My mom has with her the Green Card and the Tax return and the current valid passport, but she does not have with her the previous expired passport she can’t find the old one!
Is this problem for her? Will she be able to get her American citizenship if she can’t find her expired old passport?
Any body went through this? What was the outcome? Thanks to all.
I have not been through the interview process yet, and each interview (and IO) is different, but I can offer you my perspective as a person who has been on this forum for a while. The whole purpose of the naturalization process and interview is to establish somebody's eligibility to be a citizen. The reason an applicant is asked to bring his / her passport is so that (1) continuous residency, and (2) physical presence can be verified. Continuous residence essentially means no absences from the US of 6 months or more. Physical presence means that you must have been physically present in the US for at least 30 months in the five year period after you got your GC. Foreign travel obviously affects both of those things.
The quickest and easiest way for an IO to verify that an applicant meets these criteria is to look at existing and expired passports. However, this alone does not tell the whole story: passports are often left unstamped, especially when crossing at land borders, people lose expired passports and some countries do not even allow individuals to retain expired passports. While it is desirable to bring expired passports to the interview, the best thing to do now is to take a look at your mother's application and try to bring as much documentary evidence supporting all claims she made, particularly around the continuous residence and physical presence claims she made.
To prove continuous residency in the US, she can bring to the interivew: utility bills, rent receipts, mortgage payments, bank statements, pay stubs, letters from employers, tax returns, tax transcripts and a myriad of other documentation about her life. These can be used to sketch a "picture" of your mother as a person who kept a full time residence / job / life here in the US. Same goes for physical presence. If your mother has a high number of short trips that led to many days outside the country, she may want to try and dig up some documentation on these trips: credit card receipts, bank statements, hotel bills etc. - anything to show the dates of the trip and its temporary nature.
I don't believe that your mother will be denied citizenship because she does not have her old passport. The only time this would happen is if she is (a) so close to the limit of continuous residence or physical presence that the IO wanted to see more documenation, or (b) the IO simply does not believe her story, in which case more documentation will be required. The best way to deal with both of these, if they do occur, is to over prepare before the interview. Have her find and then bring all supporting documentation that will support her claims. If she can't remember the exact dates or durations of trips, it's OK to mention this and to provide a good faith estimate to the IO. The whole point is to get the IO to a point where he / she believes that your mother has disclosed (and proven) all material facts about her eligibility. If you start with this as a guiding principle and prepare for the interview accordingly, then she should be fine.
