Laura Justine Jacobson’s Answers

There aren't hearings or interviews involved with a 601 waiver, and the officer reviewing the waiver typically won't call you or the attorney. If you hire a lawyer, it will be for the work of preparing your waiver -- gathering all the necessary evidence and organizing it in a way to try to persuade the officer to grant the waiver. Waivers are difficult work, and an experienced immigration lawyer will know what kind of evidence officers are looking for and how to organize an argument to show...

Look at the instructions on USCIS's website for the new I-601A provisional waiver. You'll need to wait until the NVC sends you a fee bill, pay it, and include the fee receipt with the I-601A application. I'd strongly recommend consulting with a lawyer to help you with the waiver application, as it's difficult work.

You should start with a FOIA request. It's free to do, but it will take several months to get the response back. To know who to send the request to, it's important to know what agency was involved. Did your husband have a case in immigration court, where a judge ordered him deported? That would be a FOIA to EOIR, the agency that has the immigration courts. They have instructions online here: http://www.justice.gov/eoir/efoia/foiafact.htm. If all of this happened at the border, without your...

Congratulations! After getting your U visa, you have to wait three years before you can apply for permanent residency. During this time, you have to maintain continuous presence in the United States. You also have to continue helping in the prosecution of the crime you were a victim of, if you are asked to help.

If you are a U.S. citizen or Lawful Permanent Resident, you can file a petition for your husband to try to get him his green card. Because he didn't come to the U.S. legally, he won't be able to finish the process here. Instead, he'll have to go back to Guatemala to have an interview with the consulate there. When he leaves the U.S., he'll get a punishment of 10 years that he has to stay outside the U.S. because of all the time he has spent here without documents. He can apply for a waiver, to...

There is no deadline that you have to file before. Also, if you have been married for two years at the time you get residence, then you will get the permanent green card instead of the conditional one. That will end up saving you money in the future, since you won't have to file to get the conditions removed.

If you're asking about your eligibility for deferred action, unfortunately the answer is no. It sounds like you might have met all the requirements, except that you had to be here in the U.S. on June 15, 2012. Without that, there is no way to qualify. As far as the family petition for your father, you will not age out of that until you turn 21.

Try calling the 800 number for USCIS that is on your receipt notice and biometrics notice. Try to make a service inquiry for them to look into why your application is delayed.

After your asylum application is approved, you can file an I-730 for her to get derivative asylee status, as long as you were married at the time of your asylum application.

We have had success with applicants signing a statement saying they didn't register because they didn't realize they needed to, and had they known, they would have registered.