USCIS aims to reopen on June 4

It's a rainy morning here in St. Louis.

My sons Ismail and Yusuf are finishing up their SEO class, along with our digital marketing director, Mackenzie.

I was sitting down to write this morning's email when I received an important update from USCIS.

Thought I would share it with you here:

USCIS Offices Preparing to Reopen on June 4

04/24/2020

On March 18, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services temporarily suspended in-person services at its field offices, asylum offices, and application support centers (ASCs) to help slow the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19).

USCIS is readying offices to reopen on or after June 4.

Employees in these offices are continuing to perform mission-essential services that do not require face-to-face contact with the public while the offices are closed.

While offices are temporarily closed, USCIS will continue to provide limited emergency in-person services.

Please call the USCIS Contact Center for assistance with emergency services.

USCIS field offices will send notices to applicants and petitioners with scheduled appointments and naturalization ceremonies impacted by the extended temporary closure.

USCIS asylum offices will send interview cancellation notices and automatically reschedule asylum interviews.

When the interview is rescheduled, asylum applicants will receive a new interview notice with the new time, date and location of the interview.

When USCIS again resumes operations for in-person services, USCIS will automatically reschedule ASC appointments due to the temporary office closure.

Individuals will receive a new appointment letter in the mail.

Those who had InfoPass or other appointments must reschedule through the USCIS Contact Center once field offices are open to the public again.

Please check to see if the respective office has been reopened before calling the Contact Center.

So it sounds like face-to-face operations at USCIS may begin again on June 4, 2020. The agency will have a lot to deal with in those first few weeks.

Luckily, I do think that their automation system is pretty good in that when interviews are canceled, they do a much better job than they used to in getting a case automatically rescheduled

So there's that.

Hopefully, this will include naturalization ceremonies and interviews.

My man Yashar (and many other clients) have been studying hard through the pandemic and are looking forward to his naturalization exam.

His first interview got canceled because of a December snow storm.

The second interview was scheduled for March 18, the day USCIS shut down.

Here's hoping Yashar and all the immigrants get the benefits that they deserve.

Peace,

Jim

PS - we had a great webinar yesterday with nearly 90 people attending to hear our thoughts on the new Trump ban on entry into the U.S. We are cleaning up the video now and will send it out in tomorrow's email. Stay tuned.

We have a regular Ask Me Anything set for this coming Tuesday, 28, 2020 at 4 pm central. You can sign up in the link below.