Archive for category: Hardship Waivers

I just had a consultation with someone who hired an attorney and they filed the hardship waiver but they didn’t file it in a way that would be in the clients best interest because it was not well prepared.

Unfortunately there was a statement of reason and that was it. There was no legal brief and the supporting arguments didn’t demonstrate the exceptional hardship.

So it’s really extremely important that the hardships are flushed out. In this situation their hardships were just basically stated and that is not enough. It needs to be backed up with evidence, it needs to be demonstrated through not only flushing out exactly what would happen if you faced hardship as a US citizen or permanent resident if you had to go back to the home country, but also it needs to be backed up with evidence and in this situation it was just unfortunately statements that were written by the actual applicant, and the applicant did the best job that they could.

But the attorney really did not. It appeared to me the attorney did not provide guidance or do anything that would take the case a step above to result in an approval. You know sometimes requests for evidence, they do happen but they can be prevented in many situations or even if you get a RFE it’s easier to respond if the case was thoroughly prepared: in this situation the case wasn’t thoroughly prepared so the RFE is going to be very difficult to substantiate and build.

Basically a whole new case needs to be built because nothing was done, so it makes it much more difficult if nothing was done. Now if the attorney does prepare a very thorough case from the get-go, then it’s a lot easier to respond to the RFE. So if you’re in a situation where you get a RFE and sometimes if you hire a new attorney, they may need to start over and rebuild the whole case just does it, it was a new filing depending upon what was done.

So I invite you to contact us at (916) 613-3553.

If you do get a RFE don’t worry you can respond to it and get an approval we’ve done that in many many situations you just need to make sure that you get the right legal counsel and if you have questions call us at (916) 613-3553 or email us at info@ranchodlaw.com thanks and have an awesome day!

We’re gonna go into detail about that a little bit. One option is filing an appeal. If you feel like the officer made some errors in their decision then you can appeal and it’ll go to the AAO (Administrative Appeals Office) and another set of eyes will look at the decision. Now it’s important to contact an immigration attorney as soon as possible because you have very limited time to file the appeal so you want to do that immediately. In that situation you can address the erroneous reasons that were made in the denial so in this situation what we normally do is we prepare a detailed legal brief addressing the reasons for the denial and why we think those reasons are not accurate. Another option is to refile a case if some new facts came out – so for instance let’s say you’re a United States citizen and you have a new United States citizen child: that would be a new factor of exceptional hardship. You can refile the case and include that new factor there to try to get an approval based off of the new additional factor that your new child being born and the hardship that would create with having a child in the picture.If you are going to refile I would recommend having some new factors of exceptional hardship to discuss.If you’re going to spend this significant amount of time because you have to go through the whole filing process again and of course the money that it’s going to take to refile as well, you don’t want to just refile based off of the same situation. Now every case is unique so that would be up for your attorney to decide by evaluating the facts of your case. Sometimes it might even make sense to refile, it’s just important to get this evaluated by an immigration attorney as soon as possible, as soon as you get a denial, that way you are able to have time on your side rather than against you. I want to thank you for tuning in to get your questions answered – thank you and have an awesome day!

Before doing so, I want to express our gratitude to all of you that have been checking in every week. For all of our clients, stay tuned because we are going to talk about how we got an I-601a Waiver approved for a Mexican national

We were able to get this case approved in 3 and a half months

Right now, the government processing times, specifically for the I-601a Waiver, is between 5 and 7 months. That’s only for the I-601a Waiver.

That’s one step and there are three steps in the process. Before that is the form I-130 which is taking 6 to 8 months and then there’s the National Visa Center processing and the U.S. embassy processing.

So I’ll tell you a little bit about this case and how we got it approved.

The spouse was married to a U.S. citizen she has 2 U.S. citizen children – he has 2 U.S. citizen children as well, the same kids, and basically what we did is what we normally do and that is a very thorough investigation for our clients: specifically in the case of this client, we were seeking different factors that could be considered extreme hardship. In this case we were able to find a medical condition she had that would not be covered by the foreign health insurance. Also, the U.S. citizen spouse had a very good job and the way she got that good job was by going to school and she ended up having to get a significant student loan: if she had to go back to Mexico she wouldn’t have been able to pay back those student loans and she also needed the husband’s joint income to help pay the student loans as well!

Alright – That is a wrap for today, we’re going to be here next
Wednesday I want to just thank you for tuning in we look forward to seeing you next week. Call us at (916) 613-3553 if you have questions. Thank you and have an awesome day and see you next week, bye for now.