Letter from Congressional Liaison Officer—did we get kicked to back of line?

[jxn 86]

Hello all! My wife and I filed for AoS shortly after marriage last year and have a priority date of January 6th, 2014. Our case moved to "Testing & Interview" in February, and my wife received her EAD in March. Since then, the only thing that happened is we updated our address in August. When USCIS registered the new address, we jumped back to Initial Review and on the 19th of this month we were back in Testing & Interview.

Here's where it gets strange. After feeling like our case was going slow for Washington, DC standards, I called and a Tier 2 rep confirmed that we were listed as living in Connecticut with our Washington, DC address being listed simply as an additional address on file. I very carefully ensured in my application that our Washington, DC residence was listed as our physical/permanent address and Connecticut would be used only as our mailing address. This is because we were due to move to another apartment in Washington, DC and didn't want to risk not getting mail at an old address. Probably a bad decision but no fault of our own.

We decided as soon as we learned this to update everything to our new DC address following our move. Our case then moved on August 6th to Initial Review and, like I mentioned earlier, went forward back to where we were before in Testing & Interview on September 19th.

Frustrated at the pace of things, I contacted our congresswoman and we received a response from USCIS today. Here is the response:

According to our records, we received [name]’s file from the Hartford, CT District Office (transfer) on September 8, 2014 due to change of address (new jurisdiction). At this time [name]’s case is in queue for initial interview. If your constituent does not hear from our office after 90 days from today regarding any notice of action or scheduled interview, please contact us again to check on the status.

A few points on this. We never actually changed jurisdiction, we just changed from USCIS' erroneous location for us to our correct address.

Also, strangely enough, the information this gentleman quotes is out of date. He said today that my wife is in Initial Review when in reality she has been in in our current stage for four days and any record check done this week would reflect that.

Now, shouldn't we have retained our priority date? With the Washington, DC field office working on cases from January 6th as of the last processing times update (which is data from July 31st), that would mean nearly two months have passed and our case would be one of the first in line whether it were transferred to the DC office or whether it had been there all along.

I'm concerned that we are outside of a standard timeframe, but that the USCIS address error and the address change mean I'm not technically outside of normal processing timeframes since the case gets delayed with each irregularity.

At this point, I'm reading about lots of June filers getting their green cards as my wife and I wait with no sign of an interview notice despite having filed nearly half a year earlier, having no RFEs, and being a very straightforward case. Does anyone have a definitive answer if "moving" from one state to another (because in reality we moved a few blocks but USCIS miscategorized our mailing address as our permanent address) "resets" the clock and puts you at the end of the waiting line or if it should make little/no difference? Is there any argument as to why our case is outside of normal processing times? Thanks for your help!

[TBoneTX 43,021]

*** Thread moved from main "AOS from WS&T Visas" forum to the Case Progress subforum. ***

[jxn 86]

All of my original questions remain, but I have an additional one: as soon as the USCIS processing times website updates in early October with the processing data from August 30th, my local field office will obviously have made about one month's worth of progress. Because the current data (from July 31st) says the current day being worked on is January 6th (my actual priority date), we will be well past that date and I would be able to escalate the issue since it is very much outside of normal processing times, correct?