Pibo,
Contacting the congresman was the great experiance ever..... he sent me a letter at home within couple of days saying that someone in his office is looking into my case and then couple of days later they called me to say that my case was approved,,,, allthough the message on my case didn't changed at that time. In any case: Christophoer Shays... type your zip code....
Steps to contact congressman/senator
Doesn't matter democrats or republicans
Here are the links:
http://www.house.gov/
http://profiles.numbersusa.com/
Steps to contact congressman/senator
1- first find out who serves your area.
2- Call their office and ask how they prefer to receive documents and requests for Federal Casework Inquiry. If they have their casework coordination offices in Washington DC then send fax to avoid delays
3- Fax/Mail them a letter explaining your situation (personal hardship, BSIC incompetence, you paying taxes for many years, law abiding contributor to your community, looking forward to become a voting citizen, blah blah blah)
4- Make sure you include all information: EAD #, Alien #, SSN, type of application, NAMES, Address with INS, when filed, RD, ND, RFE, Fingerprinting dates, etc, etc, anything and everything (politicians love documentation, so kill a few trees, it can only help)
5- ask them to "advise you on how to obtain the adjudication status of the application. You have contacted BCIS several times and the information on the website is very vague and estimates keep changing etc."
6- Do not ask them to help approve the application, because they dont do that. They are smart, they know what you are looking for, so they will use their "Political" means to pursuade the application process. Just be gentle and kind in your letter, write with a tear jerking tone, ask for advice
7- THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT: You have to write a PRIVACY disclaimer in your letter stating that you authorize their office to look into all aspects of your case and in accordance with the Privacy Act, you (SIGNED below) are authorising them the use of the included information you are providing to conduct any research necessary to research the status and processing information about your application" This will avoid you from writing another letter with signed authorization.
good luck.
Following is a sample letter.
============================================
Dear Senator,
We are writing this letter to request your office's help in finding the status of our employment based adjustment of status(I-485) applications, pending with Nebraska Service Center for over two years. We had filed our I-485 applications in December 2001(RD: 12/11/2001, ND: 12/14/2001) with Nebraska Service Center, Lincoln, NE. We were finger printed the first time on 4/11/2002. After waiting for over 19 months, we received a request for further evidence on 7/11/2003 in which the following items were asked to submit. 1) Primary applicant's employment verification, 2) Clear copy of birth certificate for the dependent applicant and 3) Birth affidavits for both the applicants from parents or relatives. We promptly responded to this request and sent all the required documents that were received by INS on 7/30/2003. The status query website of INS was updated to reflect this the day received these documents. Subsequently, we received a notice for the second finger printing as our original finger prints expired by this time. We were finger printed on 9/12/2003 and I had called FBI who confirmed that the results were sent to the INS the same day.
Since then, we haven't heard anything back from INS and are desperately waiting for our cases to be approved. We have already renewed our work permits (EAD) twice and currently hold our third EADs. We have no clue why the adjudication on our cases is taking so long while the cases filed much later than ours are routinely being approved. It has been more than 5 months since we responded to the rfe and don’t understand why it is taking so long for the INS to look into our cases. We have plans to visit India in May this year and are in a dilemma whether to apply for the travel documets(advance parole) or to wait for the approvals. We never applied for our advance paroles till now in the hope of getting our cases approved by now.
We would like to request the help of your office to find out what exactly is going on with our cases and if possible push for a faster adjudication. We'd highly appreciate any help that your office can provide in this matter.
Sincerely,
XXXX
XXXX
Here are more details of our cases:
Primary applicant: XXXX(Receipt No: XXXXX)
A# XXXXX
Beneficiary: XXXX(Receipt No: XXXXX)
A# XXXXX
Receipt Date: 1/11/2002
Notice Date: 1/14/2002
1st Finger Print: 4/11/2002
RFE Issued: 7/11/2003
RFE response received by INS 7/30/2003
2nd FP: 9/12/2003
