ChrisMM

Dont lose faith just yet. I was feeling like this early last week since our 5 month mark was on Dec 8th. On Dec 1st I prepared a letter to my congressman and signed the privacy form they required. They put in a request for status update and USCIS said it would take 2 weeks to complete. I truely believed it would come in those two weeks and sure enough we got approved on Dec 14th.

Let me say that when you get that email with the word "approved" you instantly forget all the pain you've gone through. Since receiving the good news we have been re-energized to keep going now that we know whats next.

Don't lose faith and just stay focused.

This is what happened to us. Not knowing what to send in as we've never done this before, we sent the 129F with no supporting docs back in April, on June 24th we got a denial notice. We then did our research and realized what we did wrong. Sent a whole new packet (this time with more than enough documentation) on July 2nd. We are still waiting for our NOA2.

This whole process is a nightmare. The 5 month timeline is bad enough, but we had to deal with this twice and its still nowhere near complete. Also, the fees went down, not that it helped us as we paid the higher fee twice

My advice is to call and report a problem with the application, explain to them what happened and see if you can get it back. However, i think you might be out of luck with the money. Since they already cashed the check I dont think they will refund you.