Does presentation matter with USCIS?

By Jessica Suotmaa 1

Any time we’re filing documents on behalf of clients with the court system, there are court rules on how documents must be presented and filed. Other government agencies, such as the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), do not have set rules on presentation and organization because they allow applicants to apply without a lawyer.  Unfortunately for us, the lack of regulations doesn’t mean we can file a client’s handwritten form with our own handwritten letter, but it does beg the question: does presentation matter?

The official answer is that as long as your writing is legible, you use the right colored paper for the right documents, and your paperwork is not dirty, damaged, or too dark/light to read, it should be fine.

To get to the unofficial answer, we try to put ourselves in the immigration officer’s shoes.

Imagine you’re a government employee in a factory-style assembly line where you only have one very specific duty.

Maybe you’re the person who opens the mail and divides the paperwork and bags the attachments and staples them together.

Maybe you’re the person who goes through the document pile with a checklist to ensure all necessary documents have been submitted.

Or maybe you’re the lucky person who gets to make decisions on the 20-100 cases that land on your desk each day (we’re not sure what their daily quotas are).

Now we don’t know what you think of when you imagine yourself as an immigration officer at USCIS, but here’s what we think:

We think about the number of files coming in, the boring and repetitive tasks associated with each file, and the size of the files our office tends to send out and we feel like giving the officers a hand.

We want to make their jobs just a little easier by organizing the files the best we can according to their requirements.

Here’s how we do it:

  • We carefully review your individual situation and thoughtfully present your case in the most clear and concise way possible.
  • We review the application/petition requirements, list them, and detail all the ways our client meets each requirement along with supporting evidence.
  • We write personalized cover letters with narrative summaries of each of our client’s unique situations.
  • We type up all forms and form attachments to ensure legibility.
  • We include separate document indexes when we have too many exhibits.
  • We divide our file package with colored paper so that each section is clearly separated, or so that each exhibit can be easily found.
  • We label everything, include exhibit tabs, and we staple any odd-sized attachments, such as photos, medical reports, or CD-Roms to the package so as to prevent them from falling out of files.

We hope our clients can appreciate the time we spend organizing and presenting their cases to immigration as it really is not as simple as just printing out forms, making copies, and dropping them off at the post office.  Preparing your case involves so much more attention and effort that we only do because we care enough to do it.

Lum Law Group–we care enough.