Hey Sm1smom / BritSimon,
I would definitely appreciate some advice right now.
We had our green card interview on June 2nd. It would have been a very easy and pleasant interview (the IO told us that he was approving everything), except that the IO said he had to deny our case because we had filed too early (we had filed based on the early filing memo). Thankfully, on your advice, I had included a copy of the early filing memo in our file and after finally convincing him to actually read the early filing memo (which he stared at almost in disbelief, reading and rereading it a number of times) he agreed that it was clear that the memo said that we had filed on time, but that he thought it was very likely to have been superseded by now due to it being dated 2013 and he would "have to research it some more". He said clearly that we would hear within 10-14 days if it had been approved or denied, based on the results of his research. He made it very clear that there were no other problems with our case. He seemed pretty annoyed that he had been proven wrong (although we were very, very polite in doing so), and I felt uneasy as to how the interview had ended.
Three weeks later (on June 23rd) we still had not heard anything, so my husband went in for an info pass to find out what was happening. We had realised after the interview that in the stress of talking about the early filing memo, we had forgotten to ask about the background check or the KCC file, so we wanted to find out if either of them was causing a delay, or if it was still just the filing date that was the problem.
The lady who conducted the info pass seemed to be very evasive and not really want to answer questions. She implied (although refused to explicitly state) that there was nothing wrong with our background check. She didn't seem to know what a KCC file was and refused to answer the question about it, wanting to know why we we asking about it. So it seemed to be a rather fruitless visit. We had already called KCC and they had confirmed that the file was sent in February, so hopefully that is not holding things up. She did say that our case was still with the interviewing officer, and that he had 45 days to make a decision.
So here is my question: what do we do now? A number of people have advised us to get a congressman involved ASAP, to hold them accountable for the filing date and hopefully avoid getting a denial issued. One person has expressed great concern that the IO is potentially discriminating for us, and waiting for our case to just expire rather than deny it, as a denial would clearly be a mistake, and wants to write to the congressman on our behalf to get their intervention for possible discrimination. Here on this forum, contacting the local congressman seems to be used mostly as a way to get a stuck case moving again. So what would you advise? Here are the main questions:
1) WHEN should we get a congressman involved? Should we wait until the 45 days have expired (which would be July 17th)? Or should we just go ahead and get the congressman involved right away? Or do we have to wait 45 days from the date of info pass, which documentation online seems to imply, which would be more like August 8th?
2) HOW should we get the congressman involved? Do we try to get them to address the filing date issue and / or potential discrimination? Or should we just ask them to try and get things moving? Obviously if things get moving, but a denial wrongly gets issued, that will be much harder to fix than if they address the filing date and we get an approval. So what do we ask the congressman to do?
Thank you SO MUCH! This forum and that spreadsheet have been such a help during this process!
