British Expatriate Network

So, I managed to loose my resident card and applied of a replacement which btw costs you about $200! This is all at the same time I am looking to adjust my status.

Checked the approval date which was April 2004. Mailed in everything (including the copy of my appointment for replacement resident card) and everything got to the service centre by March 30th. All good, or so you would think!

Opened the mail yesterday to find I have a rejection notice from the INS telling me I filed too late! It appears that everything should of been filed (according to the INS officer at the National Service Center) by March 1st 2005.

Appears I have to send all my stuff back with a note explaining the confusion and pray they accept that this is a simple misunderstanding and let me stay. If they don't then I have a real problem. I suppose for a single bloke it wouldn't be too bad but when your wife and kids are here you can imagine the problems.

Oh yeah, all that and I can't work right now because obviously I am technically out of status.

shock

That sounds rough.

How did the dates get mixed up? Did you lose a year somewhere?

Is it the removal of conditions on your residency that you were adjusting?

The misunderstanding comes from the case status online saying the approval date was the 1st of April which it appears is not the date they seem to use! I have no idea, its all a mess right now. To confuse matters even more the INS told me I should have sent in the adjustment of status by March 1st 2006! All that's left is to send a letter back with our stuff and pray basically.

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You should have told them you were from mexico then you would have had a lot of support from presure groups .

To be honest, Nottslad, I highly recommend you employ a lawyer rather than do it yourself. We had a problem when we started filing for adjustment of statue from visa to greencard. We were already working with an immigration lawyer and she stated to us that we had one chance left, and it had to be perfect or that would be it!

Also, our eldest didn't get his greencard through when the rest of us did. To save money, our lawyer said we could try and sort it ourselves. We were given a huge runaround and got nowhere. After us taking weeks trying to get it sorted we ended up still paying our lawyer to sort it and it was done and approved within a week.

Even if you don't want the lawyer to do everything, it could be worth a consultation at least.

Sounds like decent advice Ben. And as for JohnA your right I should start my own pressure group for rights!

Hopefully it works out and they don't throw me out of the country. At the end of the day it was a simple misunderstanding but we all know the INS doesn't really care about such things.

You either file within there set of rules, regulations or deal with the results.

Think Ben has the right idea - have an immigration attorney work on your behalf. Going to cost you but gives you a much better shot at fixing this.

I sympathize with your predicament, and since i will have the "removal of conditions" thing coming up in a few months, I appreciate your posting. We do though have a very good immigration attorney (the same as did my original AOS), and according to him there is a 3-month window before the expiry date of my present green card during which time I am supposed to file my application. He will let us know as soon as this begins.

I would say the same as others - get yourself an attorney to sort this out. I wish you all the best. Do let us know how you get on, please.

Nottslad, are you saying you had a temporary residence card and then applied for your green card? Because I know that the expiration date on the residence card doesn't mean how much more time you have to AOS. I may be wrong but don't you have something like 999 days to apply for AOS after you originally recieve your temporary residence card?. ???