Tentenseven

I would appreciate if folks here could share their experience of applying at the New York Passport Agency - how soon can you make the appointment and did they get their passport the same day. Thanks!

thank you! your experience at ny passport agency was they asked you to return next day? is there a same day service - appreciate it!

Thanks!

Hi - I would appreciate it if NYC filers that interviewed at Federal Plaza could help answer these questions:

- If you waited at Federal Plaza after the interview, how many hours did you have to wait for the oath letter after the interview?

- How many weeks apart were the interview and and the oath ceremony?

- Where did folks apply for same-day passport in NYC?

Thanks very much!

Ive finally been scheduled guys... :dance:

congratulations lucy! are you in NYC office? or long island? have you received the interview letter yet? congratulations again!

I passed the test and interview went well. I added a traffic ticket during the interview, which has to be signed off by a supervisor first before a decision can be made. I'm one step closer and very happy.

Have any October NYC filers received interview letters yet? Thanks.

Long Island. The fingerprinting was in Hicksville, the interview should be in Holtsville. The GC interview was in Garden City office, which is now closed. Are you on LI too?

On other boards NY filers also started getting their interview notices this week. It's a relief to see things finally moving.

Congrats, arvinb! You're almost done! When did you have your interview?

Congratulations! Has anyone in New York/NYC (not LI) been scheduled for an interview yet?

Same here... I'm also waiting in NY, and also still stuck at "in line for interview" since Dec 22nd. According to some other boards, looks like NY currently takes the longest. It's very frustrating.

Oh, well, we just have to be patient...

Congratulations to all who finished their immigration journey and became citizens!

Agree - also waiting in NY 'in line for scheduling'

Hi Tentenseven, I think I posted earlier in this thread about my interview and oath so you could search for posts around those dates. The interview was pretty much a non-event: very long wait, but interview itself probably took five minutes. The oath ceremony was much more moving than I had anticipated. I think it may be hit or miss in NYC -- I have also met people who took the oath in the USCIS building. My filing-to-oath was faster than others from NYC in my month. I would like to think it is because they thought I am fabulous but I'd speculate it's a combination of luck and a name that, as far as I know, I don't share with anyone in the world.

Good luck!

Thank you!

took my oath yesterday, there were 124 new citizens swarn in, the whole process lasted for about 2-2.5h

HudsonValley/other NYC-August-filers

From looking at your timeline, it sounds like there was a gap of about 3 months (NYC-filers) between being scheduled for an interview and receiving the interview email - wondering if you received any emails/information between these two events - any updates? I am a mid-November NYC filer and trying to handicap when should I expect my interview update.

Thank you

Hey uham, I stopped by just to see how you were doing. Congrats!!!! All's well that ends well.

Hey carpe diem

I am a November NYC filer and just read your timeline. Wondering how your experience was with NYC office - interview, oath etc. Sounds your filing-to-oath process took about 4 months? Thank you!

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from what i found out ONLY military/military spouses get thie kind of NOA.but seems like everyone get a difrent # of days.

Hi all -

I am a November filer for the NY area - my question is - if the USCIS website indicates that the NY office is currently processing April cases, is it worth checking/hoping that my/our NY case will get an interview letter as soon this month (January). Just trying to figure what is a realistic expectation.

Thanks!

Thank you!

Because a lockbox is a collection box like all other times you filed.

Because the NBC processes most things in general.

Because local offices only process cases when they are being interviewed.

Hi - I have a couple of background questions about the N400 process - (1) why is the N400 application mailed to the appropriate lockbox - TX or AZ when it eventually has to be sent to the local office for processing; and (2) why do Notices in the mail come from National Benefits Center? Thanks!!

hello all - is it required to inform USCIS if you have done a walk-in finger print appointment before the appointment date? Thanks!

One more question for recent applicants: I will file my I-751 in VT - what percentage of filers there are typically interviewed (esp VT applicants)? And, in general, are interviews the norm in I-751 applications? Thanks.

Although the timeline is loosely being referred to, but why is it November 2010 you are eligible? Eligibility is effective 90 days prior your 3rd LPR anniversary (in addition to the other restrictions others mentioned). If you got your card in May 2008 then the earliest would be February of 2011.

Thank you all for your replies and for correcting my math. Eligbility to file N400 is 3 years from LPR, NOT 3 years from marriage to USC. Appreciate the clarification.

One more question for recent applicants: I will file my I-751 in VT - what percentage of filers there are typically interviewed (esp VT applicants)? And, in general, are interviews the norm in I-751 applications? Thanks.

Hello all

I am preparing to file my I-751 next month (married to USC in November 2007 - 2-year GC received in May 2008).

I believe I am eligible to file for US citizenship after November 2010 (after 3 years of marriage to USC). Does the status of my I-751 application filed next month - ie whether or not I have received the 10-year green card - determine whether or not I can potentially file my citizenship application after November 2010? Put differently, if my I-751 is "stuck" for a period of time - can I still file the N400 after November 2010 or do I have to wait to receive my 10-year green card before I can file for citizenship?

Thanks.

The officer said our case has been under review with an officer (I don't remember the exact wording) since March 14, 2008. I'm guessing that was when the results for the 3/3/08 biometrics came in. He thought we'd be hearing very soon and told us not to move. (Like I would do anything to jeopardize mail delivery at this time!)

that was the response i got for last 2 Infopass appointments , "pending decision by a officer", on my last Infopass the officer said , change of address!!! it is goint to slow the process

Hi - I am curious - how did you find out that your namecheck had cleared? thanks.

March 21, 2008

An Agent, a Green Card, and a Demand for Sex

By NINA BERNSTEIN

New York Times

No problems so far, the immigration agent told the American citizen and his 22-year-old Colombian wife at her green card interview in December. After he stapled one of their wedding photos to her application for legal permanent residency, he had just one more question: What was her cellphone number?

The calls from the agent started three days later. He hinted, she said, at his power to derail her life and deport her relatives, alluding to a brush she had with the law before her marriage. He summoned her to a private meeting. And at noon on Dec. 21, in a parked car on Queens Boulevard, he named his price — not realizing that she was recording everything on the cellphone in her purse.

“I want sex,” he said on the recording. “One or two times. That’s all. You get your green card. You won’t have to see me anymore.”

She reluctantly agreed to a future meeting. But when she tried to leave his car, he demanded oral sex “now,” to “know that you’re serious.” And despite her protests, she said, he got his way.

The 16-minute recording, which the woman first took to The New York Times and then to the Queens district attorney, suggests the vast power of low-level immigration law enforcers, and a growing desperation on the part of immigrants seeking legal status. The aftermath, which included the arrest of an immigration agent last week, underscores the difficulty and danger of making a complaint, even in the rare case when abuse of power may have been caught on tape.

No one knows how widespread sexual blackmail is, but the case echoes other instances of sexual coercion that have surfaced in recent years, including agents criminally charged in Atlanta, Miami and Santa Ana, Calif. And it raises broader questions about the system’s vulnerability to corruption at a time when millions of noncitizens live in a kind of legal no-man’s land, increasingly fearful of seeking the law’s protection.

The agent arrested last week, Isaac R. Baichu, 46, himself an immigrant from Guyana, handled some 8,000 green card applications during his three years as an adjudicator in the Garden City, N.Y., office of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the federal Department of Homeland Security. He pleaded not guilty to felony and misdemeanor charges of coercing the young woman to perform oral sex, and of promising to help her secure immigration papers in exchange for further sexual favors. If convicted, he will face up to seven years in prison.

His agency has suspended him with pay, and the inspector general of Homeland Security is reviewing his other cases, a spokesman said Wednesday. Prosecutors, who say they recorded a meeting between Mr. Baichu and the woman on March 11 at which he made similar demands for sex, urge any other victims to come forward.

Money, not sex, is the more common currency of corruption in immigration, but according to Congressional testimony in 2006 by Michael Maxwell, former director of the agency’s internal investigations, more than 3,000 backlogged complaints of employee misconduct had gone uninvestigated for lack of staff, including 528 involving criminal allegations.

The agency says it has tripled its investigative staff since then, and counts only 165 serious complaints pending. But it stopped posting an e-mail address and phone number for such complaints last year, said Jan Lane, chief of security and integrity, because it lacks the staff to cull the thousands of mostly irrelevant messages that resulted. Immigrants, she advised, should report wrongdoing to any law enforcement agency they trust.

The young woman in Queens, whose name is being withheld because the authorities consider her the victim of a sex crime, did not even tell her husband what had happened. Two weeks after the meeting in the car, finding no way to make a confidential complaint to the immigration agency and afraid to go to the police, she and two older female relatives took the recording to The Times.

Reasons to Worry

A slim, shy woman who looks like a teenager, she said she had spent recent months baby-sitting for relatives in Queens, crying over the deaths of her two brothers back in Cali, Colombia, and longing for the right stamp in her passport — one that would let her return to the United States if she visited her family.

She came to the United States on a tourist visa in 2004 and overstayed. When she married an American citizen a year ago, the law allowed her to apply to “adjust” her illegal status. But unless her green card application was approved, she could not visit her parents or her brothers’ graves and then legally re-enter the United States. And if her application was denied, she would face deportation.

She had another reason to be fearful, and not only for herself. About 15 months ago, she said, an acquaintance hired her and two female relatives in New York to carry $12,000 in cash to the bank. The three women, all living in the country illegally, were arrested on the street by customs officers apparently acting on a tip in a money-laundering investigation. After determining that the women had no useful information, the officers released them.

But the closed investigation file had showed up in the computer when she applied for a green card, Mr. Baichu told her in December; until he obtained the file and dealt with it, her application would not be approved. If she defied him, she feared, he could summon immigration enforcement agents to take her relatives to detention.

So instead of calling the police, she turned on the video recorder in her cellphone, put the phone in her purse and walked to meet the agent. Two family members said they watched anxiously from their parked car as she disappeared behind the tinted windows of his red Lexus.

“We were worried that the guy would take off, take her away and do something to her,” the woman’s widowed sister-in-law said in Spanish.

As the recorder captured the agent’s words and a lilting Guyanese accent, he laid out his terms in an easy, almost paternal style. He would not ask too much, he said: sex “once or twice,” visits to his home in the Bronx, perhaps a link to other Colombians who needed his help with their immigration problems.

In shaky English, the woman expressed reluctance, and questioned how she could be sure he would keep his word.

“If I do it, it’s like very hard for me, because I have my husband, and I really fall in love with him,” she said.

The agent insisted that she had to trust him. “I wouldn’t ask you to do something for me if I can’t do something for you, right?” he said, and reasoned, “Nobody going to help you for nothing,” noting that she had no money.

He described himself as the single father of a 10-year-old daughter, telling her, “I need love, too,” and predicting, “You will get to like me because I’m a nice guy.”

Repeatedly, she responded “O.K.,” without conviction. At one point he thanked her for showing up, saying, “I know you feel very scared.”

Finally, she tried to leave. “Let me go because I tell my husband I come home,” she said.

His reply, the recording shows, was a blunt demand for oral sex.

“Right now? No!” she protested. “No, no, right now I can’t.”

He insisted, cajoled, even empathized. “I came from a different country, too,” he said. “I got my green card just like you.”

Then, she said, he grabbed her. During the speechless minute that follows on the recording, she said she yielded to his demand out of fear that he would use his authority against her.

How Much Corruption?

The charges against Mr. Baichu, who became a United States citizen in 1991 and earns roughly $50,000 a year, appear to be part of a larger pattern, according to government records and interviews.

Mr. Maxwell, the immigration agency’s former chief investigator, told Congress in 2006 that internal corruption was “rampant,” and that employees faced constant temptations to commit crime.

“It is only a small step from granting a discretionary waiver of an eligibility rule to asking for a favor or taking a bribe in exchange for granting that waiver,” he contended. “Once an employee learns he can get away with low-level corruption and still advance up the ranks, he or she becomes more brazen.”

Mr. Maxwell’s own deputy, Lloyd W. Miner, 49, of Hyattsville, Md., turned out to be an example. He was sentenced March 7 to a year in prison for inducing a 21-year-old Mongolian woman to stay in the country illegally, and harboring her in his house.

Other cases include that of a 60-year-old immigration adjudicator in Santa Ana, Calif., who was charged with demanding sexual favors from a 29-year-old Vietnamese woman in exchange for approving her citizenship application. The agent, Eddie Romualdo Miranda, was acquitted of a felony sexual battery charge last August, but pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery and was sentenced to probation.

In Atlanta, another adjudicator, Kelvin R. Owens, was convicted in 2005 of sexually assaulting a 45-year-old woman during her citizenship interview in the federal building, and sentenced to weekends in jail for six months. And a Miami agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement responsible for transporting a Haitian woman to detention is awaiting trial on charges that he took her to his home and raped her.

“Despite our best efforts there are always people ready to use their position for personal gain or personal pleasure,” said Chris Bentley, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services. “Our responsibility is to ferret them out.”

When the Queens woman came to The Times with her recording on Jan. 3, she was afraid of retaliation from the agent, and uncertain about making a criminal complaint, though she had an appointment the next day at the Queens district attorney’s office.

She followed through, however, and Carmencita Gutierrez, an assistant district attorney, began monitoring phone calls between the agent and the young woman, a spokesman said. When Mr. Baichu arranged to meet the woman on March 11 at the Flagship Restaurant on Queens Boulevard, investigators were ready.

In the conversation recorded there, according to the criminal complaint, Mr. Baichu told her he expected her to do “just like the last time,” and offered to take her to a garage or the bathroom of a friend’s real estate business so she would be “more comfortable doing it” there.

Mr. Baichu was arrested as he emerged from the diner and headed to his car, wearing much gold and diamond jewelry, prosecutors said. Later released on $15,000 bail, Mr. Baichu referred calls for comment to his lawyer, Sally Attia, who said he did not have authority to grant or deny green card petitions without his supervisor’s approval.

The young woman’s ordeal is not over. Her husband overheard her speaking about it to a cousin about a month ago, and she had to tell him the whole story, she said.

“He was so mad at me, he left my house,” she said, near tears. “I don’t know if he’s going to come back.”

The green card has not come through. “I’m still hoping,” she said.

Angelica Medaglia contributed reporting.

Honeysweets, earmuffs, vivi and bmadeline - thanks for your replies - my AP and EAD turned up pretty quickly - almost around the time I got my interview letter - mid-Feb. I guess that made me (falsely) hopeful that the name check would also move along quickly. oh well. I will post when I hear something.

Have any December filers had an interview and had their GC approved *at the interview.* My wife and I interviewed in New York last week; the DAO said that everything was ok, but namecheck was pending, and we would have to wait for the namecheck to clear. Not counting folks who got their GCs without an interview, I am trying to figure out how many December files actually saw their namechecks progress fast enough to get approved/cleared by their interview dates (mid-March)? Thanks!

Great - thanks for the answers. As luck would have it, hours after posting I received my biometrics appointment letter for an appointment 10 days away. Wondering if it helps/hurts the process if I turn up early (within the next couple of days) for biometrics? I don't want to upset the applecart so to speak. Does anybody have any feedback?

Also, here is a silly question: What is the order & location of processing? I shipped my docs to Chicago lockbox but got receipts from MSC, MO. I live in NY, is my case now going to be forwarded to the NY office - to the ASC or the Field Office. Hoping some of the veterans on this helpful forum can help understand the mechanics of the process. Many thanks!

Great - thanks for the answers. As luck would have it, hours after posting I received my biometrics appointment letter for an appointment 10 days away. Wondering if it helps/hurts the process if I turn up early (within the next couple of days) for biometrics? I don't want to upset the applecart so to speak. Does anybody have any feedback?

Also, here is a silly question: What is the order & location of processing? I shipped my docs to Chicago lockbox but got receipts from MSC, MO. I live in NY, is my case now going to be forwarded to the NY office - to the ASC or the Field Office. Hoping some of the veterans on this helpful forum can help understand the mechanics of the process. Many thanks!