Finding an immigration lawyer in North Carolina to handle your legal matter requires much more than looking for a licensed attorney to prepare and file your paperwork. The filing process is riddled with pitfalls. Something as simple as forgetting to sign a form, sending the filing to the wrong address, or omitting a payment can result in a rejection of a filing. If the filing is time-sensitive, then the case would be
Consider that in nearly all NC immigration cases, you will be tethered to your immigration attorney for five to six months (for green card or naturalization cases), six months to a year (for motions to reopen or reconsider), or a year or longer (for I-751 removal of condition petitions). Although the law firm will file the necessary paperwork, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services can send all sorts of notices to you, which include receipt notices, rejection notices, Requests for Evidence, Notices of Intent to Deny, biometrics appointment notices, approvals or denials.
Many of these notices require that the foreign national take some sort of action in order for the case to move to the next stage. Failure to act most often results in “denial for abandonment.” With the exception of the rejection notices (where the check for filing fees are returned) in the majority of the other cases, the foreign national has no choice except to re-file. This not only wastes precious time, but also requires the foreign national to pay the filing fees all over again. In many naturalization cases, the citizenship applicant is hoping to naturalize in order to file a green card for his/her spouse, child (under 21 years), son or daughter (21 years and older).
Now think about marriage-based cases where the U.S. citizen lives in the U.S. and the foreign national spouse/child lives abroad. In these cases, obtaining a green card for the foreign national involves filing paperwork with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the National Visa Center (NVC), and the U.S. Consulate abroad (and for Diversity Visa lottery cases, add in the Kentucky Consular Center).
Combine the filing requirements, with the bulk of correspondence from varying agencies, and the deadlines (to avoid abandonment) and you have a recipe for disaster.
At Legacy Immigration, we understand that the immigration stakes are high. We are sensitive to our clients’ needs to obtain work authorization in order to “survive” or to “make ends meet.” We understand that long delays in processing times can put an enormous amount of stress on a relationship. So we correspond with our clients via text and email (and other electronic media) to file cases within days (in emergent cases) or weeks (in all other cases).
Each client’s case is unique so we treat it as such. We do not take a “rubber stamp approach.” During our phone calls with our clients, we take the time to listen to our clients. We ask our clients the proper questions so they can explain the unique factors (and there are unique factors to every case) which we then use in our argument to win their cases.
How We Can Help
- For our out-of-state or out-of-country clients, regardless of time change, we speak with the client to obtain a chronological history and timeline of their immigration history
- We are a full-service immigration law firm so we handle all types of cases including employment-based or family-based green cards (adjustment of status or consular processing), citizenship, green card renewals, Deferred Action for Childhood Removals, nonimmigrant visas, waivers of inadmissibility, petitions for removal of conditions, Temporary Protected Status
- For our clients with removal orders, we make persuasive arguments to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to reopen old removal orders
- For our clients with criminal convictions, we draft creative legal arguments supported by recent and compelling case law to bolster your case.
Contact Us
We offer a free case evaluation by phone. We are available Monday through Friday from 8:30 am to 8:00 pm and Saturday from 8:00 am to 12:00 pm. In-person consultations are by appointment only. Please call our office at 301.529.1912 or click here to contact us. Please be sure to provide a timeline of events along with details of your entire immigration history.
