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I'm hoping someone else has experience with this type of situation. I know what the standard response from USCIS is (I just received it, in a slightly incoherent fashion, for the umpteenth time in my USCIS Inbox), but when all these rules were written, nobody had envisioned a global pandemic would slow things down THIS much.
My wife became a citizen in June. We moved in July and in the move discovered that we could not find her citizenship certificate. In hindsight, we should have just applied for a passport ASAP, but we were put off by the long processing times (oh, the irony). We filed the N-565, and, at the time, processing times were being indicated around six to eight months. We were a bit surprised that a simple piece of paper takes this long to process, but couldn't really do anything.
In the months that passed, we received only a confirmation of the fact that Nebraska has received our documents package. Not even a note of whether or not they were sufficient. Now I see on USCIS's website that the waiting time has more than doubled (16 to 20 months) and the only people who can ask for a case inquiry are those who filed after April 2019...
It seems unfathomable to me that we might have to end up waiting for nearly two years for my wife to be able to leave and safely return to the States. It's not something we're planning on doing anytime soon, with Covid and all, but it would be nice to be able to travel once we have our shots. Furthermore, my wife's grandmother is getting on in years and should the unfortunate happen, it would be good if my wife was at least able to say goodbye. It's just really tough to fathom that she had more traveling rights with her green card and travel document than she does as a citizen after an unfortunate turn of events...
Any advice? Can anything be done at all? We've retained copies of her certificate, but were told we wouldn't be able to use those to apply for a passport. Would her travel document still be valid? (pretty sure we've retained that) Clutching at straws here.
I'm hoping someone else has experience with this type of situation. I know what the standard response from USCIS is (I just received it, in a slightly incoherent fashion, for the umpteenth time in my USCIS Inbox), but when all these rules were written, nobody had envisioned a global pandemic would slow things down THIS much.
My wife became a citizen in June. We moved in July and in the move discovered that we could not find her citizenship certificate. In hindsight, we should have just applied for a passport ASAP, but we were put off by the long processing times (oh, the irony). We filed the N-565, and, at the time, processing times were being indicated around six to eight months. We were a bit surprised that a simple piece of paper takes this long to process, but couldn't really do anything.
In the months that passed, we received only a confirmation of the fact that Nebraska has received our documents package. Not even a note of whether or not they were sufficient. Now I see on USCIS's website that the waiting time has more than doubled (16 to 20 months) and the only people who can ask for a case inquiry are those who filed after April 2019...
It seems unfathomable to me that we might have to end up waiting for nearly two years for my wife to be able to leave and safely return to the States. It's not something we're planning on doing anytime soon, with Covid and all, but it would be nice to be able to travel once we have our shots. Furthermore, my wife's grandmother is getting on in years and should the unfortunate happen, it would be good if my wife was at least able to say goodbye. It's just really tough to fathom that she had more traveling rights with her green card and travel document than she does as a citizen after an unfortunate turn of events...
Any advice? Can anything be done at all? We've retained copies of her certificate, but were told we wouldn't be able to use those to apply for a passport. Would her travel document still be valid? (pretty sure we've retained that) Clutching at straws here.
You are trying to justify what you see as unjust. Unusual for you here.
Your wife did not file for a US passport and cannot find the most important document in her life. How to apply for a passport is even in the little booklet you get at swearing in. It is a well known fact that US citizens are required to leave and enter the country on their US passport.
I am sorry to hear about grandmother but a lot of people in the US and elsewhere have not been able to be with their loved ones at the end even if they lived in the same building.
What does the travel document of a Green Card holder have to do with a now US citizen?
At least she is with you! Count your blessings! A lot of families would gratefully swap with you!
You are trying to justify what you see as unjust. Unusual for you here.
I'm actually not trying to justify anything (mainly because there's nothing TO justify). I'm trying to explain the situation and am a little bemused by how a loss of a single document could wreak such havoc (also I am having a tough time understanding how the replacement of a piece of paper can take over a year, even in Covid times, but that's a separate matter altogether). Perhaps some frustration is coming through. I'm sure you'd be frustrated, as well, if you were told to wait 16 to 20 months for the replacement of a single piece of paper that costs over $500 to replace.
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Your wife did not file for a US passport and cannot find the most important document in her life. How to apply for a passport is even in the little booklet you get at swearing in. It is a well known fact that US citizens are required to leave and enter the country on their US passport.
All of this is correct. We made an error in judgment (though in good faith, as we were told her passport would take a long time and we thought it would be better to apply for one once we'd moved so we wouldn't have to deal with address changes, etc., which, from personal experience we know is not always an easy process with USCIS) and a subsequent error in preserving her documents. We couldn't imagine losing them, either, but here we are. Things happen. Let he without sin cast the first stone and all that. It doesn't mean that what we've done is so irredeemable that we are somehow unworthy of help; I'm not looking for sanctimony and for someone to tell me we screwed up - I know we screwed up. But there's absolutely no way we are the first people to have experienced this, so I was looking for ways in which others have dealt with the situation. As an example, I have found a few online pages and forum responses where people were able to apply for a passport with just a copy of the naturalization certificate (which we have). Was curious if anyone had any first-hand experience with that and if this is truly an option (I'm skeptical).
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I am sorry to hear about grandmother but a lot of people in the US and elsewhere have not been able to be with their loved ones at the end even if they lived in the same building.
Be that as it may, I'm not really sure how this is relevant. This is tantamount to saying I shouldn't donate a dollar a week to feed a starving child in Syria because we have children starving in the U.S.; the logic is flawed. If the answer is "what you're trying to do is impossible", then so be it, but your invocation of other people's problems is misplaced here.
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What does the travel document of a Green Card holder have to do with a now US citizen?
It's an illustration of our current situation. Ostensibly, people have fewer rights as green card holders than as they do as citizens. And a Travel Document for some reason takes half as long to obtain as a Citizenship Certificate.
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At least she is with you! Count your blessings! A lot of families would gratefully swap with you!
Again, completely irrelevant to the problem at hand. I appreciate where you're coming from, but this isn't helpful.
Our plan is now to visit our local passport center, as well as to call USCIS and see if we can get an appointment at a local office. Again, if at the end of the day we hear "sorry, but all you can do is wait", then so be it, but it's certainly a question worth asking. And it's a data point I'll gladly bring back here for whenever this inevitably happens to someone else.
Last edited by highlanderfil; 01-09-2021 at 06:24 PM..
Social Security refused to do anything without my original as did USPS when I did not want to hand over my original. In some cases a certified copy of the naturalization document can be accepted for US pass port applications. This in itself is an oxymoron as the document states it may not be reproduced. Passports can be expedited to a couple of days of processing.
Address change on a US passport - link please.
Last edited by Threestep2; 01-10-2021 at 06:52 AM..
Social Security refused to do anything without my original as did USPS when I did not want to hand over my original. In some cases a certified copy of the naturalization document can be accepted for US pass port applications. This in itself is an oxymoron as the document states it may not be reproduced. Passports can be expedited to a couple of days of processing.
My last trip to the post office yielded a similar answer, so I know I'm swimming upstream here. But I'd be remiss if I didn't at least try to see if there was another way. The simple fact that this oxymoron exists means that there have been things with the process that hadn't been thought through. So it's certainly a question worth asking.
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Address change on a US passport - link please.
Not on a U.S. passport (and I'm not sure what I'm meant to link you to or why), but on any application that has to do with USCIS. You're supposed to notify them when you move. From personal experience, this is not an easy task, because even if you do it online, you're still supposed to call to confirm it's been done (which is an insanely arduous task in the best of times) and even then it's not always a given. As an example, our current address is registered in the system correctly, but it has a second address line with the suite number of our attorney. Thankfully, that hasn't yet become a problem as our house doesn't have suites, so the post office knows it's an error. That said, I regret each day that we didn't just give the address of one of our friends as a mailing address and had just done it then, but it was June 2020 when the decision was made and who the hell knew what would happen with the pandemic. Ironically, one of the reasons we didn't want to do it then was because we were concerned with being without any document confirming my wife's citizenship for an extended period of time (which was, at the time, quoted as around six months) - and look at us now...
1. We were able to apply for a U.S. passport earlier this week with a copy of her certificate and a printout of an email from the national passport center stating it was sufficient as long as it was accompanied with her N-565 receipt. Went to our county clerk to do that. No telling if this is going to be enough or not, so will keep checking the passport site. Did pay for expedited processing, so hopefully will at least know within a month if it's been accepted.
2. Just got notification in the mail that a replacement N-565 is on the way. Completely out of the blue, nothing in the online account even mentioning this.
All the excitment ... . Please get several copies certified and keep it safe!
If and when she gets her passport, I don't think we'll need copies of her cert, but we may try to get them anyways (as I understand, it's a bit of a process in that you have to write to DC and mail in the original - so best to wait until she has her passport). I have mine (and hers now) tucked away with the other vital docs now. I haven't had to get mine out in the 13 years since I received it, except to apply for my wife's status adjustment, so I think we'd be OK even without the extra copies.
And as far as excitement goes, take a look at the processing times from the USCIS website. They've only now updated it to 8.5-11 months. Used to be 16-21 and the "Receipt date for a case inquiry" was April 2019 before rapidly accelerating to March 2020. Neither one of those have been accurate, of course. It took five months and a week, but we wouldn't have known this ahead of time.
It appears as though that e-mail from the National Passport Center allowing us to use the copy of the naturalization cert has done the trick. Just received notification via e-mail that the passport was approved and should be arriving this week.
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