I-140 Backlog Campains

letter to congressman regarding I-140 backlog

Everyone, please revise/re-write, provide comments or add whatever you think we should put into words to fight with this unreasonable delay.
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Dear Congressman/woman:

We are writing to you regarding the egregious delays in Employment-Based I-140 adjudication process in California Service Center(CSC).

According to CSC’s latest progress report, it is adjudicating the I-140 cases filed before July 2003. However, USCIS has not shown any progress for most of the I-140 cases since August 2003. The processing date has only moved forward a week in I-140 EB2 category since last August. There was not much progress in other I-140 categories either. Congress has expressed repeatedly that the reasonable adjudication period is 6 months for immigration cases.

Delays in processing immigration benefits applications are a cause for grave concern to employers and employees. Delayed adjudications take away all sense of repose, security and predictability. We invite your attention to this most urgent and pressing problem.

We request you to prevail upon USCIS to expedite I-140 processing to a period of 6 months so that relief is made immediately available to I-140 filers who have been waiting so long for their approvals.

In summary, we would like to request your help to 1) contact the CSC of the USCIS and express frustrations with the I-140 processing delays; 2) request CSC to provide a reasonable timeframe to reduce the current backlog of I-140 applications; and 3) request Mr. Don Neufeld to move some reasonable number of adjudicators from other operational units to the I-140 unit.

We would appreciate a speedy response from your office regarding steps taken to remedy this persistent problem.

Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.

Sincerely,
 
Try meeting your representative

needluck4GC said:
askgc,

Totally understand. I'd like to join but unfortunately I'm in southern CA. But I can help with the document.
Click to expand...
Hi needluck4GC & honeybee,

I understand you cannot attend the townhalls in bay area but you
can find out your representative and goto his office and tell him /
his office staff about these delays. Also mention that we
immigrationportal.com are working with MH (CA 15), AE (CA 14) ,
ZL (CA 16), senator Dianne Feinstein ... and they (MH, AE, ZL) are
contacting CSC. Ask them to help by working with CSC. If your rep has
any townhall meetings then try attending them. Normally after townhall
meeting people can talk to the representatives.

Also see if you guys are close by are if any others in forum are close by
and willing to come with you.

This is just a suggestion.
 
Anybody joining me at townhall meeting?

I am *mostly* attending the townhall meeting on friday. I will not talk
or raise issues this time as I did few days back but I will give the final
document prepared by you guys to help the non concurrent filers. I will
mostly talk to Ms. Bernardette about the backlogs and see what she can
do.

By the way needluck4GC is it worth mentioning saying these backlogs in 140
were not there 1 year back at CSC (that is in Aug 2003). To be very specific
you can quote EB2 which was taking less than a month in aug 2003, now more
than a year and we dont know how long and we dont see any kind of
improvement and everything is stand still... If the processing continues like this
then we may see the delays that happenned for 485 in CSC (2 - 3 years) or
more ...

Also ask specific plans to be given by Mr Don Nuefeld on how they are going to reduce this backlogs ...
 
askgc said:
By the way needluck4GC is it worth mentioning saying these backlogs in 140
were not there 1 year back at CSC (that is in Aug 2003). To be very specific
you can quote EB2 which was taking less than a month in aug 2003, now more
than a year and we dont know how long and we dont see any kind of
improvement and everything is stand still... If the processing continues like this
then we may see the delays that happenned for 485 in CSC (2 - 3 years) or
more ...

Also ask specific plans to be given by Mr Don Nuefeld on how they are going to reduce this backlogs ...
Click to expand...

I think that's where most problems are from. Since there were no I-140 backlog a year ago and it only took a couple months for the approvals(no more than 6 months), that's why AC21 portability was never a issue. If you want to specifically mention the situation a year ago, maybe you could link these problems together. Just my 2 cents.
 
askGc,

Thank you for your suggestion. I am planning to visit Congressman townhall meeting for Adam Schiff. I visited his website as well as www.house.gov but I am not able to find out townhall meeting schedule for Adam Schiff. If you have the information for schedule for townhall meeting link, please post so that I can visit this congressman.

Thanks,
-Honeybee


askgc said:
Hi needluck4GC & honeybee,

I understand you cannot attend the townhalls in bay area but you
can find out your representative and goto his office and tell him /
his office staff about these delays. Also mention that we
immigrationportal.com are working with MH (CA 15), AE (CA 14) ,
ZL (CA 16), senator Dianne Feinstein ... and they (MH, AE, ZL) are
contacting CSC. Ask them to help by working with CSC. If your rep has
any townhall meetings then try attending them. Normally after townhall
meeting people can talk to the representatives.

Also see if you guys are close by are if any others in forum are close by
and willing to come with you.

This is just a suggestion.
Click to expand...
 
Spoke with Mike Honda at Milpitas Town Hall meeting

Today I attended MH's Milpitas Town Hall meeting. Totally less than 20 people
attended the meeting, so he had a decent amount of free time after the
meeting. I gave him the petition that askgc created; and explained the issue -
he immediately replied that "yeah, I am aware of the Job portability issue. I
will certainly look into it". I also spoke with his staff Jeff, he mentioned that
they had received 3 petitions on this issue and they had already contacted
USCIS. He told me to contact MH's office if I don't hear any response after Sep 15th.
 
Great

gc369 said:
Today I attended MH's Milpitas Town Hall meeting. Totally less than 20 people
attended the meeting, so he had a decent amount of free time after the
meeting. I gave him the petition that askgc created; and explained the issue -
he immediately replied that "yeah, I am aware of the Job portability issue. I
will certainly look into it". I also spoke with his staff Jeff, he mentioned that
they had received 3 petitions on this issue and they had already contacted
USCIS. He told me to contact MH's office if I don't hear any response after Sep 15th.
Click to expand...

Are you still coming tommorrow to Cupertino townhall meeting?
I am still on. I guess I will talk again about the backlogs this time.
Lets see how many people will come in this time. Good job gc369.
 
140 Backlog in CSC

I am planning to bring few copies of this letter to the todays meeting.

=========================================================
ImmigrationPortal.Com
5225 N. Wilson Blvd, Arlington VA 22205

Re: 140 Backlogs in California Service Center.

Dear Congressman Michael Honda,

First of all we want to thank you for your support to the legal immigrants, who are contributing a lot to the economy of the United States, by co-sponsoring the HRES 384 IH and joining members of Congress to Address Immigration Petition Backlog. We are very happy to say that due to efforts of you and fellow congresspersons there has been enormous improvement in USCIS processing for I-485, Adjustment of Status cases. We are writing to you regarding the egregious delays in Employment-Based I-140 adjudication process in California Service Center (CSC).

According to CSC’s latest progress report, it is adjudicating the I-140 cases filed before July 2003. However, USCIS has not shown any progress for most of the I-140 cases since August 2003. Also note that the processing times for I-140 cases an year back were less than 6 months for all types of cases and now grown to 12 months to 18 months. The processing date has only moved forward a week in I-140 EB2 category since last August. There was not much progress in other I-140 categories either. We have not seen any specific plan or steps in reducing these delays. Congress has expressed repeatedly that the reasonable adjudication period is 6 months for immigration cases.

Delays in processing immigration benefits applications are a cause for grave concern to employers and employees. Delayed adjudications take away all sense of repose, security and predictability. We invite your attention to this most urgent and pressing problem.

We request you to prevail upon USCIS to expedite I-140 processing to a period of 6 months so that relief is made immediately available to I-140 filers who have been waiting so long for their approvals.

In summary, we would like to request your help to 1) contact the CSC of the USCIS and express frustrations with the I-140 processing delays; 2) request CSC to provide a reasonable timeframe, plan to reduce the current backlog of I-140 applications; and 3) request Mr. Don Neufeld to allocate some reasonable number of adjudicators to the I-140 unit.

Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.

Sincerely,
 
What's backlog anyway?

I know it's a very stupid question. :eek:
I did not want to ask it before,
but now, I want to join your effort to speed up 140,
especially about AC21 issues.

So, could someone explain a little bit about "What's 140-backlog"?
I could not say anything to officer or congressman
if I'm not understand them at all.
 
just attended Mike Honda's town hall meeting. It finished pretty late so I did not get chance to talk to Mr. Honda. He did address immigration issue a bit in the Q&A. He sounded a strong supporter to legal immigrants and understands major issues. He did not mention backlogs.

I gave his staff the petition letter. I also faxed his office the petition letter yesterday. another two people from ImmigrationPortal sat next to me. Did you guys get to talk to Mr. Honda in person?
 
Sorry

whorl1quote said:
just attended Mike Honda's town hall meeting. It finished pretty late so I did not get chance to talk to Mr. Honda. He did address immigration issue a bit in the Q&A. He sounded a strong supporter to legal immigrants and understands major issues. He did not mention backlogs.

I gave his staff the petition letter. I also faxed his office the petition letter yesterday. another two people from ImmigrationPortal sat next to me. Did you guys get to talk to Mr. Honda in person?
Click to expand...

I was not able to make it as I found the place only at 7:00 PM due to
construction de tour. I tried calling you for help but could not reach
you either :-(. May be we should have personal cell numbers with us and
help each other.
 
Little hope

I met Mr. Honda along with the one more person having the same petition. We spoke to him and handed over the petition to his staff. Mr. Honda mentioned that the petition should be more specific and he has already got the copy from others as well. He wanted to know the salient points only, so that he can understand where to go, whom to speak with and so on. He also mentioned that they are not in power, so he can do only limited things. It was totally unexpected that none of our questions were picked in Q&A session. I think either they couldn’t understand the importance of this or there were more critical issues than ours.

Mr. Honda told us to contact his staff and hand over the petition to him. When we speak with him, he mentioned that their office will forward this petition to CSC and normally CSC doesn’t do any action and very rarely they reply to the individuals names mentioned in the petition.

It appears to me that something is better than nothing. I have a little hope of anything major to achieve via this meeting.

Good Luck to all of you.
 
I attended Mike Honda's town hall meeting

I attended Mike Honda's town hall meeting along with whorl1quote and JKBGC. I personally handed over my petition to him and discussed about it. He asked us to meet his staff Geoff. We met with Geoff. Geoff told us that he already recieved this petition and is already forwarded to CIS. He asked us to wait for sometime till we get a response from CIS.

I guess something is better than nothing. I think, we must continue sending petitions to congressman. But, more importantly, we should try to get in touch with CIS directly. Maybe try to talk to Prakash Khatri (CIS Ombudsman) to highlight our concern. I had sent email to him, but, no response from him. We should try to get appointment for telephonic talk with him.
 
Contact info for Fujie Ohata

Does anyone has email Id for Fujie Ohata. We need to express our frustrations about AC-21 directly to her.
 
Do you think email to AILA will work? Anyone tried b4?

Advocacy & Public Affairs (e-mail: advocacy@aila.org)
Judith Golub, Senior Director, Advocacy and Public Affairs
Marshall Fitz, Esq. Associate Director, Advocacy
Julia Hendrix, Media Relations Associate

Liaison and Information (e-mail: liaison@aila.org)
Crystal L. Williams, Esq., Senior Director, Liaison and Information
Cora Tekach, Esq., Associate Director, Liaison and Information
Holly Moskerintz, Online Services Manager
 
askgc said:
Sure, can you give me more information? If you can provide me a paragraph I
can put it into the doc I will prepare. Actually this time I am planning to write
basically about AC 21 law (rather than processing delays, I will make it a small
part of it due to which we are facing problems) and how we are suffering due to
concurrent adjudication memo, pilot programs.

Also guys give me inputs on how VSC, TSC, NSC are doing (processing ...)so
that we can make some generic doc and we can go ahead from there. I am
not seeing enough participation in CSC, may be its time to make it nationwide
so that we will be heard (and listened too).
Click to expand...
 
Compare to other service centers, TSC processing times are very slow. I applied I-140 on 12 th Dec. 2003 and I-485 on 31 st Dec 2003, I don't know when I see these approvals.
 
Dear All,
CSC is going to Process I-130 Cases for Nebraska and Texas Service center. This is ridiculous, they are not reducing there I-140 backlog and taking loads of 2 service centers.
This is totall injustice to us.

rb180
 
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