We contacted Marisol Andrade around February/March of 2018 for her to take care of my residency process through marriage.
At the beginning everything was fine, we signed all the documents, payed the immigration fees and the lawyer fees and were waiting on our response.
Throughout this process, comm...unication was very scarce, not only between the lawyer and us, but also between the lawyers knowledge of the new immigration laws and requirements. We didn’t know that until our first interview with the immigration officers.
But before that, I do need to point out that Marisol didn’t care for my process; when I received the immigration letter setting up an appointment for our interview I called her (keep in mind that it’s been at least an year since she was in our case), she had the audacity to forget if I was marrying a woman or a man.
When we started this, she gave us a list of potential questions and what to prepare for the interview. We did as told, and also she (in the beginning) said we had the option for her to be in our interview, but she didn’t say how much a lawyer is advised to have while being interviewed.
We got to the interview and, virtually, none of the questions she said they might ask were asked. We also learned that the pictures, videos, memories together, tickets and all of that to support our marriage were supposed to be sent with all of the other documents before the interview. She also failed to let us know how the process work, and what paperwork we needed to have complete knowledge of what we were signing on; for example the affidavit which states my wife would be responsible financially for me for 10 years. All of those things bit us in the back when we went to the interview. The decision of not taking Marisol with us was made based on her not saying she was essencial for the interview and also by not knowing who I was marrying to, so how could she help us there with those questions?
Some days after the first interview, we received a letter for a second interview, I waited a bit to see if she was going to call, but no call at all. So I called her and she was surprised that there were another interview; she said they it would be just the same as the first interview but with more questions; also didn’t offer to go with us to this interview which she knew nothing about.
We got there, they separated us, they had one officer and one investigator in the room in which they interrogated me for 45min, and then my wife for about an 1h30min. We were broken after we left the interview and didn’t know what to do. We contacted her and she said to wait for the response.
After a little bit we received a NOID, we called her about it and she said for my wife (only) to write a letter about our relationship and just get more pictures. (Of course that was the wrong answer). We were already looking at other lawyers and we found one very competent. Him and his team analyzed our case and came with a strategy for this NOID, not only they were working on a lot of paperwork, but also he said to us to reach out for friends and families so then they could testify in a notarized letter about our relationship; he also told us to get all of our bank statements, rents, insurances, clubs, theme parks, anything we had that was jointed to present it as evidence. With that I had to go to Marisols firm and get all the paperwork from her (which she charged me for) so I could give to the other lawyer; and concluding we let her go.
Now I’m back in Brazil since 2020 because of her lack of information. The immigration officers completely denied our second application based on our first done by Marisol.
I don’t know if she’s good with other cases, but as far as we know, she doesn’t understand or know much about immigration, specially after Trump got into office and how much it changed.