Oh GOD, I feel your pain, dear.
USCIS sucks unwashed llama ass. Good LORD I’m glad to be done with them, for now, until I apply for citizenship (if I choose to).
People would be AMAZED at the stories we hear from fellow USCIS survivors, I swear to Og…
I havne’t been back all week, I’ve been very busy.
The Congresscritter got my daughter a green card in one day. We got a phone call telling us to come down with pictures to get her temp card, and were told we’d have the perm card in mail in six weeks.
**
Ginger**, I’ll take you up on that beer, and then buy you one right back. These people are so dense I feel my features morphing from the gravitational pull every time I talk to them.
Ivylass, it’s become a running joke in the family that we’re going to send our daughter to Mexico, but her citizenship there for pennies ont he dollar, then bring her across the border illegally. We figure she’d be a citizen in not time!
Thanks for all the stories guys, it helps to know that the USCIS doesn’t hate only me.
We had similar problems with our son’s naturalization.
I believe the process for dealing with INS (or whatever they call it nowadays).
File proper forms
Wait for them to fuck up
Call your congressperson
Have problem fixed immediately
Sometimes I think the only think the congressperson’s staff does is INS’s job.
Can I play? I got to join in the fun just this week.
My wife and I are adopting a child from China. As part of this process, we have to fill out a USCIS form, form I-600A if you’re interested, which is an application to adopt a foreign orphan. We submitted everything months ago, along with the fees (about $700), sent the home study when it arrived, and waited for them to send us notice for when we’d need to turn up for fingerprinting (why yes, it does irk me that Cletus and Brandine can just rut around out back and pop out a whelp while my wife and I have to go through three background checks, two fingerprintings, a body cavity search of our finances and backgrounds, then spend thousands of dollars and wait for two years to have a child, why do you ask?).
So we wait, and wait, and hear nothing. We call the number provided, but of course there are no actual human beings to speak to. Finally, my wife finds an email address and fires off a query.
Response from the Department of Homeland Security (who has swallowed the USCIS and who I’m convinced are the real problem here): erm, we have a record of receiving your application, but we can’t find it. Send us another one.
To their credit, we did get our fingerprint appointment pronto after that. Still, it should have only taken 60 days to process the application, and every setback like this puts us closer to the Danger Zone. By that I mean the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Lordy, I do not want to be traveling in China then…
Excuse me!!! It’s highly inappropriate and wrong to call our goverment leaders morons. You’re insulting morons everywhere.
That is terrific news!
Bolding mine. Is there any place one can get references for lawyers?
I’ve had to deal with a combo of USGuv’t+lawyer twice. The first time, I hired the lawyer: until then I’d done my paperwork myself but I figured since I’d be having a “real job” it would be simpler to have someone do it for me. She colluded with my employer’s lawyers to get me to work illegally (I left the country; they’d left out of their calculations the tiny fact that I’m from Spain, not Cuba).
The second time, I was being brought over by my employers of 2+ years; the lawyer got paid for making three sets of photocopies of the company’s report from the previous year (I could have downloaded it from the intranet and made two copies) and sending it to me along with the form I had to fill and information on how to fill it; she also included where to send it. The form and instructions, she’d printed them from the webpage of the US Embassy in Canada; the direction she gave me was for the US Embassy in France. I was in Italy at the time but in any case I had to send the info to the US Embassy in Spain, being a Spaniard and all. And of course the fee had to be paid in Euros, not Canadian Dollars 
So yeah, hiring a pro is a Good Thing - but it’s got to be one whose brain works.
Good observation Dagerosa. USCIS employees are soo fucking stupid they couldn’t beg for change.