USCIS vs USPS

Those who have gone through the process of IA know that there are a lot of ups and downs in this process. We jump through hoops, cross all our T's and dot our I's, and hope that everything goes smoothly. Sometimes its does, but many times we hit obstacles along the way.

Dave and I have hit a bit of an obstacle and although I'm sure it will work out, it is a bit frustrating at the moment.

When we started the home study process for Naomi's adoption our social worker told us that it wouldn't take long to get everything done. After all, she was just updating a few pieces of information from our home study for Lili's adoption. Based on this information, we went ahead and submitted our I600-A, which is basically our application to Immigration Services (USCIS) to adopt a foreign born child. Once USCIS receives the application and finds everything to be in order, they scheduled an appointment for us to go to the nearest processing center to be fingerprinted. From the date our fingerprints were done, we had 15 months to complete our adoption. In other words, as long as we had met with an official at the US Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia before the 15 month expiration date hit, we would be fine. However, if our Embassy appointment didn't fall within that 15 month window, we would need to get a new set of prints completed for a new background check. Our fingerprint appointment was on December 5, 2008 and from that date on we seemed to hit delay after delay getting our home study completed. By the time it was all said and done, over 5 months had passed which meant we had 10 months left before our fingerprint expiration date. Needless-to-say, that wasn't enough time so a couple weeks ago we requested a fingerprint renewal appointment and found out via email that our appointment is scheduled for tomorrow. The problem is, we haven't received the 'required' fingerprint notice letters and the Chicago USCIS office has told us that we can't have our fingerprints redone without those letters.

The question is, why don't we have those letters? In this situation another federal governing body comes into play - the United States Postal Service. You see, here in little Minier (population 1300), our mail is delivered to the post office. We have lived here for about 15 years now and for most of those 15 years our mail has been delivered to us regardless if it is addressed to our street address or PO Box address. However, the USPS is getting more and more particular and recently mail that is addressed to our street address isn't always delivered. For a matter-of-fact, more times than not, it is returned to the sender and eventually this will happen 100% of the time. I'm sure you've figured out by now that USCIS is sending our correspondence to our street address and there is a 99.9% chance that the USPS returned it.

As I write this post, I am waiting for a response from USCIS advising me on the steps necessary to get a new appointment scheduled and how to change our records to reflect our PO Box along with our street address so we actually receive our mail from them in the future. So far, no response. Fortunately, Noami is worth jumping through all these hoops and if I have to drive to Chicago and visit USCIS to get our letters, I'll do it!!!!