US Immigration from Brazil

Just passing by to share my experience, in case there are others in a similar situation.

In the end of August I received the notice my citizenship interview had been scheduled for October 6th. Local office was San Bernardino and, from other timelines, I saw they were doing same-day oaths. Great!

Only one caveat. Last year I booked an international trip to celebrate our anniversary, and we were supposed to leave on October 14th. With a same-day oath, I would no longer have my green card to travel back to the US.

I did as other VJ members recommended and got in touch with the Passport Agency line to try and schedule an appointment, and was lucky enough to get one in LA for October 12th. Mind you, I called them exactly after leaving my oath ceremony on Oct. 6th.

The passport was ready for pickup today at 1pm! Success.

So if you have an international trip coming up and are in the limbo post-oath, I sincerely recommend contacting the Passport Agency service before giving up hope. From beginning to end they were very accommodating and courteous.

I'm not going to lie, having no passport the night before our trip was SUPER stressful but I'm glad it worked out in the end. (And the passport is the next-gen one, very nice!)

I haven't seen anyone mention this website, but I stumbled upon it on a Reddit post yesterday when somebody posted all the approved I-485 cases in the past day (Many of them were filed in March and July of THIS year!)

You can also see other case types like I-131 and I-765. Apparently the average was about 10-15 approvals for the I-765 per day, but a few days ago, there were over 200 in a single day approved! (At least for cases starting in "IOE")

It seems a lot of people use the case numbers of the recently approved ones to see if their own cases are pretty close. For example, there were a lot of IOE09157xxxxx that were approved and apparently those were filed between March and July of 2022. Of course there is no way to know how USCIS is knocking these out, so there's no use in using this as a reference.

Here is the website and a screenshot: https://hilites.today/

You can click on the numbers to see a list of the case numbers.

I'm not sure how to get to this "hourly I-485 updates" on the menu, so here is the direct link and a picture of what that looks like: https://hilites.today/hourly

And here is the reddit post I was talking about:

Hey everyone,

Feel free to move this to the appropriate forum if this is not the right place to post this question.

Summary of the situation

My mom had a 10-year ban because she overstayed her visa in the U.S. She served her 10-year ban and now was granted a B2 visa. She will be coming to visit me and my family in the U.S. (wife and I are LPRs, child is USC). My aunt was recently in the same situation and came to visit us. Her POE was Fort Lauderdale and she got the stinky eye by some immigration officers that didn't know what to do given her history. Ultimately they allowed her in and she came and visited us on a B2 visa.

My concern is that my mom faces the same issues at the POE because she'll be entering the U.S. for the first time after the ban on a new B2 visa.

Question

Would a POE from a larger airport like Houston or Dallas be better than smaller airports POE because the officers would be more experienced in this type of situation?

We're in Austin,TX and tickets are cheaper if she comes through Sao Paulo-Mexico City and then San Antonio. My concern is the POE at San Antonio airport. Would it be better to pay more and enter through POE in Houston or would she be ok even at a smaller airport POE such as SAT?

Thanks all!

Hi people,

I have an interview at in two weeks and my lawyer also made a mistake my first trip to USA was in march 1996 and my lawyer wrote march 1995. What do I have to do, do I have any chance to correct that?

"Ola" my friends,

So last year my i485 application was denied due to a HUGE MISTAKE made by my lawyer office.