Many of you have gotten a status update saying
that your case has been transferred.
So what does this mean?
As an immigration attorney, I have filed hundreds of immigration cases and a trend
that I am now seeing in many cases, especially in my VAWA
cases, is that the case has been transferred to a new office.
So when you get this new case has been transferred letter,
or when you see it as a new status update online,
what does it mean and does it mean that it is a good thing or a bad thing?
My name is Moumita Rahman, and I am an immigration attorney
that has been practicing immigration law for the past 13 years.
I help immigrants all over the United States get their legal status fixed.
And if you would like an evaluation with my legal team,
you can give us a call at 212-248-7907
to schedule a case evaluation no matter the state that you live in.
So here's the deal.
USCIS lately has been trying a lot of different strategies
to catch up on this immense backlog that it has.
One of the strategies that has been employing is to transfer
cases from locations that are super, super busy to locations
that are even less busy, in an effort to even out the workload
between a place that's super busy, like Vermont Service Center,
which is probably now backlogged with about a 100,000 cases,
to other locations that have a lot more free time on their hand.
So one of the reasons why USCIS may transfer your case
to a new location with a different jurisdiction is because
they are actually trying to speed up the processing time on your case.
And will it actually work?
Will your case actually be sped up?
That remains to be seen and will be closely watching our cases
and this office to see if any of our recently
transferred cases do have a quicker decision time.
But my prediction is that it may speed it up
a little bit, but it's going to actually take time to see results.
And we may actually end up getting more requests for evidence
because if the new officers do not have as much training
as the other officers, they may issue RFE’s for things that are not required.
Now, what
if you have not filed a valid case, but you have a different sort of case that
you filed and you get that same letter that your case has been transferred?
Well, it has been transferred usually for the same reason.
Usually USCIS is trying to deploy strategies to even out the caseload
between different locations and make sure that processing times don't increase too
exponentially because of a backlog that a service center may already have.
Now, here's another scenario that may happen.
If you have already been approved for your I-130 or your I-360
and you see that notification that your case has been transferred,
it may also mean that they are now trying to move on to processing your I-485
and generally speaking, usually the local field
offices only have the jurisdiction to decide an I-485 and
process that green card for you.
So in those cases it's also usually a good sign
when your case has been transferred.
So I hope this helps shed some light as to why you might get these
alarming letters that say that your case has been transferred.
It's not a bad thing.
I don't want you to freak out.
I want you to instead feel encouraged that that means that your case
will not be sitting in a backlog pile as long as it could have.
If you would like our help navigating your immigration journey,
give us a call at 212-248-7907 so we can see if we could help you along the way.
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My name is Moumita Rahman. See you next time.