When Jesse Miranda, a U.S. citizen, sponsored an application for a green card for his wife nearly a year ago, he understood the process would take time.
On Wednesday, when he saw someone posting on Reddit that they had received sudden approval for a loved one’s initial application for permanent residence, he wondered if he and his wife had gotten lucky.
Miranda quickly went to check the application status on the website of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees visas and naturalization.
“What kind of glitch causes these mass approvals?”
To his delight, the portal showed that their application had also been approved to move on to the next step in the process. Yet he had a nagging suspicion: Was this coming too soon? Wait times for approval of just the first step in the process can stretch more than two years, so could his wife’s application really be getting moved along so quickly?
When he called the agency’s helpline Thursday morning to confirm the approval, his suspicions proved correct. Miranda said the employee answering his call told him that his wife’s application status was unchanged.
And they weren’t the only people affected: According to Miranda, the employee acknowledged that USCIS was aware of a glitch affecting numerous applicants.
“It was heartbreaking,” Miranda told The Intercept of learning that their application status had not in fact changed. “I get that there’s technical stuff behind the scenes, but at the same time, what kind of glitch causes these mass approvals?”
The apparent glitch resulted in dozens or more applicants for green cards receiving false notices of approval for a key step in the process, according to multiple people who received the false approvals and accounts of similar approvals posted online. (USCIS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
In addition to Miranda, The Intercept spoke with two other green card applicants who received false notices of approval for the I-130 form, the first major hurdle in the process for obtaining a permanent residency visa for relatives of a U.S. citizen.
Dozens more people on Reddit and a user on an immigration-related Discord server reported experiencing the same false approval notices when they checked their application status on Wednesday and Thursday.
People began to report on immigration forums on Wednesday that they’d received approval the I-130 form, but elation turned to devastation as they came to understand the notices as an error.
On Thursday, the USCIS site appeared to be down for a time. When it came back up, accounts for applications of at least two of the people who spoke to The Intercept still showed their loved ones’ green cards as being “approved.”
Americans’ Loved Ones
The I-130 form is just the first step in applying for a green card for the spouse or relative of a U.S. citizen.
Wait times for the form’s approval range, on average, between 10 and 20 months. Often, however, they stretch out to two years or more. During that time, the applicant is unable to live or work in the U.S.
Approval, then, is the first sign that couples or families are one step closer to living their lives together in the U.S.
“This feeling of not having your partner here is already painful enough,” Miranda said. “It’s even more painful when you have that approval waved in your face, only to have your dreams crushed.”
Kate, an American citizen whose spouse and stepchild have applications pending, told The Intercept she saw an erroneous approval notice for her case on the USCIS website on Thursday after reading online posts about a flurry of approvals overnight.
Kate, who spoke with The Intercept on the condition that her surname and certain identifying details be withheld for fear of affecting her spouse’s immigration process, said she and her partner and stepchild had applied for the I-130 nearly a year ago and are living apart from one another as they await approval.
“I don’t know how I’m going to tell him. He’s going to be devastated.”
She happened to be visiting her spouse’s country of origin, and they were thrilled to be able to celebrate the milestone of being one step closer to a green card together. When she got back from their celebratory lunch, however, she checked the site again and found that none of the usual signifiers of an approval were showing up, including an approval notice that would usually appear in the site’s documents tab.
She said she had not yet told her spouse that the approval appeared to be the result of a glitch.
“It’s just devastating,” she said. “I don’t know how I’m going to tell him. He’s going to be devastated.”
“Straight Up Unfair”
On a Reddit forum dedicated to the pain and suffering of the I-130 process — called “r/I130Suffering” — dozens of people reported similar experiences with the glitch, starting with sudden elation and ending more demoralized than ever.
And on Track My Visa, a Discord where applicants swap advice and gripes about the immigration process, numerous users reported the same. On Thursday, the moderators of the forum suspended a channel dedicated to celebrating approval notices lest people celebrate prematurely.
The glitch is just the latest frustration for Miranda, who said the process to bring his wife to the U.S. has been so fraught that it’s forced a reassessment of long-held political beliefs.
The son of Mexican immigrants who immigrated legally and ultimately received citizenship, Miranda said he had long considered himself a Republican and felt that tough immigration policy was necessary to ensure a fair shot to people immigrating legally.
Now, he said, seeing how difficult it is to immigrate legally, even as the spouse of a citizen, he’s wondering if he had it wrong.
“I always thought ‘they’re just going after illegals,’” he said. “But this is affecting legal immigration to the point where it’s almost stopped. You can have a million dollars and get a green card, but if you’re trying to process a loved one and you can’t — that’s just straight up unfair.”
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