I-600a Approval

Cory called the number give and spoke to a nice man who let us know that we needed to wait 45 days to check on our I-600a.

Counting the days we noted that would be only 2 days from the deadline given on the letter about needing to pay the fee that we did not think we needed to pay. So we sent a second E-mail to the agent who helped us the first time.

He wrote from 'training' giving us an E-mail to write our question to and in less than 1 business day we learned:
 1.we were correct that we do not need to pay the fee,
 2. that our fingerprints arrived and we should hear 'in the next couple days' the final decision on our I-600a.
 3. a new phone number / e-mail and agent if we need help.

Today we received an E-mail requesting additional information if we were OK with sending it by E-mail. Cory came in and in about 1 hour sent the information off to Ashely. Just over 1 hour later we received the E-mail letting us know that the "I have processed the approval and we will send that to your mailing address listed on your home study " [This would be our Florida MFI mailing address]

Monday after receiving the E-mail about our I-600a we wrote our agency to make sure they received the E-mail letting them know that we do have residency visas in Haiti. The processing of our dossier continues and 'we'll see what happens'.

A blog from an agency in Port who talked with the IBESR last week indicated that the newly changed adoption law was sent to be printed on Friday, November 15th. Therefore, theoretically, it should be printed in the paper this week.

New confusion and a non-update on the I-600a

No word yet on our I-600a but I did find out from a Facebook group about adopting in Haiti that you cannot get status updates on line for this specific form.

This caused the message we received about no such file existing. Either we missed this on the web site or it is not stated.

The nice officer who e-mailed us before did not yet respond to our E-mail questions.

So we continue to wait and if we do not hear an update Cory will try to call the number listed after the team leaves for the USA.

Today we received an E-mail from our agency questioning our paperwork as we listed our Haiti address as our residence [know this was true on the I-600a and maybe one other location].

No other family that they have worked with in the past listed a foreign address for residency.

But after 15 years we do not have a true residency in the USA.

As we plan to live here with our family, we do have Haiti residency [since 2000] and completed our home study in Haiti it made sense to us to list our Haiti address.

The question that arose was did we have our residential visa? Yes, we do!

So responded to the E-mail and offered to send a copy of our visas or the Michigan address where we stay during our two months.

Keep praying!!

Prayer in church for the lawyers in Port-au-Prince going on strike this week. This will likely slow down all government including adoptions.

I-600a Update / Prayer

November 1st we attempted to check the status of our I-600a application on line only to discover that no such case number exists in the system.

We tried again by creating an account with the USCIS so that they can contact us by E-mail with updates on our status but again...no such case exists.

So we send off an E-mail to the nice officer who first contacted us by E-mail asking about how often we received mail from Florida to ask about our case. Waiting to hear back.....

A few weeks ago we received our first piece of mail ever through the Haitian postal system which was a notice from the USCIS about our application because we did not pay the biometrics fee. 

We did not send in that fee because we understood we did not need to as we live overseas and would need to visit the Embassy for our fingerprints.

We mailed in our prints on Oct. 9th but did not directly respond to the letter about the additional payment so maybe that is the holdup?

Praying that we find out next week about our application.