Your Tax Dollars at Work, Part 2

One of other facets of the USCIS that we've had to deal with is the immigration forms. Specifically, adoptive parents need to fill out form I-600A in order to get pre-approval to bring a child back from a foreign country and to make them a U.S. citizen. The form they send back is the I-171H, and this is one of the most important forms we need to take with us. The fee for this piece of paper is $545.00.

As with fingerprints, this document expires, but this one takes 18 months. That sounds like a lot of time, doesn't it? Well, there is some lag time after you get this form before your mountain of paperwork goes to China and the Chinese government puts you in the queue to get a child. This is known as the log-in date, or LID. The current wait time for this is 13-14 months (this fluctuates for no apparent reason that we've found). After you get your referral, there is more lag time for families to accept the referral, get travel approval, then actually travel. This can take 6-8 weeks or more.

All of this is to say that our I-171H is about to expire. So, once we got our referral, we were told to renew our I-171 as quickly as possible. So we did - we filled out a new I-600A, and sent in another $545.00 (after renewing our fingerprints, of course).

Oddly enough, we were advised by the agency we did our home study with to NOT tell the USCIS that we were needing this form quickly, or else it would surely find its way to the bottom of the pile. So, we diligently sent in a generic cover letter, saying we needed to re-apply for the I-171H. We overnighted the packet to the Yakima Sub-Office to get it there fast. The USCIS sent us a receipt, telling us they received our packet on November 9th.

Now the first time we got our I-171H, it took around 6-7 weeks. If that same time frame holds true, it would be cutting it extremely close to our travel date. It was suggested that we contact our congressperson in our area to ask the USCIS to expedite our application. So I got a hold of someone at the office of U.S. Representative Brian Baird. He has a section on his website about getting help with dealing with a federal agency!

The case worker from Rep. Baird's office contacted us yesterday and told us that USCIS doesn't expedite anything, so there is nothing we can do. He told me that in very rare cases, they can make an extension on a previous I-171H, but not to count on that. He also told me that the 18 month window is there because things can change a lot in a family in that time frame and possibly make them a security threat or something like that. I feel safer already after that explanation! I told him that I was really frustrated by all this, and he understood and told me he has already passed on this information to Representative Baird.

So, here is another time when a federal agency that we pay for is extremely unhelpful and frustrating to deal with.