Fingerprint Drama - Part 6

A week after I hung up the phone with our USCIS officer, our new appointment letter came in the mail. It arrived on a Friday, so my daughter and I prepared to drive down to my parents’ house on Sunday night, so that we could walk into the USCIS office first thing Monday morning.

On that Sunday night, we left around 9:30pm. I like driving at night because I’m a night owl and no one is on the road. We arrived down there around 11:30pm and I quickly got my stuff situated, so we could just get dressed and run out the door in the morning. As I was looking through our bags to get our clothes out and ready for the next day, I suddenly realized I did not pack an outfit for my daughter. I immediately panicked. I started wondering if I should just run out to Wal-mart really quick to have an outfit for her, but I was so tired; I really didn’t want to go out to Wal-mart at midnight by myself. All I had were the PJs she wore on the car ride down. I decided that I would wait and get her an outfit in the morning on the way to the USCIS office.

We woke up late in the morning, of course, so going to Wal-mart was out of the question. I was so embarrassed that my child would have to walk into the office with her PJs. She was pretty embarrassed too, so we put her winter coat on and she almost didn’t look like she was wearing PJs.

We arrived at the USCIS office and walked in with no problem. I wasn’t too worried about it because we’ve done this before and they let us walk in. I was told to go into fingerprinting, and when I got there I had to register with the person at the desk. I informed him that this was my second time and he asked, “did you have ink prints done last time?” I said yes, and he responded, “hmm… you shouldn’t need more prints.” He then told me to have a seat and a few minutes later a USCIS officer (not my officer) came out to talk to me. She said, “I’m so sorry, but we cannot take a second biometrics for you because your ink prints have been in the system since November 9th.” I then proceeded to tell her that I told my officer I wasn’t supposed to come back for a second biometrics because the ink prints were already taken, but he insisted this was the policy and that I HAD to come back. The woman officer then said to me, “I’m really sorry, but I am not allowed to give you a second biometrics since your prints are appearing in the system. She then told me to call my Officer and inform him as to what is going on. She said that if he didn’t understand what to do, to have him call her and she will walk him through the process.

I was so frustrated. We left the USCIS office and I drove back to my parents’ house. I immediately called my officer and left a voicemail for him and emailed him.

Our officer finally got in touch with us on the phone. A VERY LONG story short, there was some confusion because they’ve never had an incident where an agent would take the biometrics and ink prints on the same day. It messed up the organization of the systems and my officer did not see it in there. He apologized to me a few times letting me know he had never seen anything like that happen before and was sorry it took so long. The ink prints counted as my “second prints,” but get this…my ink prints came back unclassified. Who has unclassified ink prints??? Apparently, I do. I’m invisible. lol

If you “fail” your fingerprints twice, then you have to submit your local police department background check. We already had that from our home study, so I just needed to send those to him and then we would get approval. I sent them via email along with a FedEx overnight label in hopes that we would get the approval by Tuesday.

He wrote me back informing me that he received the label, but wouldn’t you know, the system was down and he could not issue our approval because he couldn’t access it. At this point, I’m laughing. No really, I’m laughing because what else can you do? He promised to move our file to the top of his pile and issue the approval first thing in the morning.

i800a Approval

The next morning, I received a confirmation email that our approval had been sent via FedEx overnight.  Once the approval was received, we could scan it in and send it to our adoption agency. They would then begin the authentication and certification process, which will finalize our dossier and make it ready to send to China!

Such a long drawn out process…