» Family-based Immigration

Each month a representative from the American Immigration Lawyers Association meets with Charlie Oppenheim, the man behind the visa bulletin curtain, to get a sense of how the priority dates may advance (or not!) in the coming months. In October̵… Read More

By Nikita Hernandez, Paralegal at Sumner Immigration Law Way to Mess Up #1: Get married before or during the process The K-1 petition and visa process is for a fiancee. Once you get married, you need to file a completely different petition with diffe… Read More

The question of when a person can submit the I-485 to apply for a green card is one of the trickier aspects of U.S. immigration law to understand. Since October 2015, the Department of State has published two charts for the family-based categories, a… Read More

We carefully monitor the status of the cases that we have filed with USCIS for our clients. Occasionally, if a case is not proceeding as expected or we encounter another issue that needs to be addressed by USCIS, we may find it necessary to place a S… Read More

Earlier this month, we wrote about two new major policy changes with U.S. immigration: 1) a policy memo was issued that directed USCIS to issue a Notice to Appear (NTA) when a petition or application was denied, leaving the beneficiary or applicant o… Read More

These are difficult times in the U.S. immigration landscape, even for foreign nationals who are in the U.S. legally. We often hear in the news about the separation of children whose parents are seeking asylum in the US, the de-naturalization task for… Read More

USCIS has traditionally taken a long time to process the I-751 petitions to remove the conditions on a marriage-based green card — we typically tell clients it will take around a year if everything goes as expected. However, in this current pre… Read More

By Cyndi Dambacher & Nikita Hernandez of Sumner Immigration Law Effective immediately USCIS will begin phasing in United States Postal Service’s (USPS) Signature Confirmation Restricted Delivery service to mail Green Cards and other secure docu… Read More