USCIS sent me a response on our FOIA

[whitecollarslave]

Originally Posted by needhelp!

.....

Please define priority date.
.....
Sincerely,

T. Diane Cejka
Director

....

Wait a minute. USCIS does not know the definition of priority date? No wonder we are in this mess.

[rajeshalex]

We are not asking data from govt. We are asking the table or the data structre so that we can write a query and ask uscis to run it.

[hopefulgc]

1) Asking for money to issue a report under FOIA cannot be justified. If the data is public, it is USCIS's job to bring it to us.

2) It is certain that we would be able to get USCIS to waive the $5k fee... but it would take time.

3) If we pay up and they make the program... we need a way so that we can request the reports at regular intervals... after all once the report is prepared, it is available and we should be able to make use of it.

4) A better idea might be to pay the $5k, but instead ask them to make an API.. to which one can we can supply the boundary priority dates using a RESTful service. If we are gonna give money.. we better get the restrained control in our hands. This will help future applicants.

[gc_wow]

It looks like USCIS needs an "official bribe" to provide that information.No body really knows if all the applications filed are really there or they sold it to recycling companies.Send that to Senator and ask him how much would he take to get us that information.If Senator is cheaper than $5000, I would give it to Senator.

[rajeshalex]

I like ur comment gc_wow . May be we should tell USCIS/Senator this is recession time and give us some discount.

[WaitingForMyGC]

Originally Posted by LostInGCProcess

This is what Ron Gotcher had to say about this wonderful organization:

Quote" Not even Congress has been able to rein in the INS/CIS. Repeatedly, they have passed legislation ordering the agency to produce reports on their backlogs - all of which have been ignored with impunity."

So, I think this is just another tactic to discourage people from getting the information thru FIA by charging some imaginary figure of $5k to get some basic information. This is the heights of Arrogance.

INS/CIS has become a rogue entity like Pakistan's ISI. No govt can rein it. :-)

I don't see any harm in coughing up 5k for the information which would help us all.
Count me in for the contribution.

[Openarms]

Originally Posted by pappu

Not so fast buddy. We are not on forums 24/7
The thread was posted last night and how can you expect instant reply.
In future if someone wants to reach us if you have any question, it is better to directly contact us rather than posting on the forum as we do not read every post.

A couple of people who got the letters have already emailed us and let us all review the letter to see if we are getting what we need from this request. Let us all agree if we want to pursue this and contribute towards this. Once we have enough people, we can go forward.

This is one of the positive steps that we have taken here and glad that we got the response from CIS. So now IV needs to get expose this letter as public as possible to get the USCIS tactics out (senate, congress, president, dhs head and all in the world). And if need be that we all need to contribute to the money they are asking. This is the good one.

[gapala]

Originally Posted by gaz

http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/C...e_04-27-06.pdf

"On April 27, 2004, the Ombudsman sent an information request to USCIS for a breakdown of data for pending employment-based applications for adjustment of status to be broken down by preference classification, priority date and country of chargeability. This request attempted to reflect similar data contained within the Immigration Annual Statistical Handbook, Chart 5, for completed cases. The Ombudsman’s interest in pending employment-based workload is in part a reflection of the broader issue relating to USCIS’ ability to support the Department of State in accurately forecasting immigrant visa requirements and the visa issuance process."

"This update will enable USCIS to identify 100% of the pending employment-based visa cases. It is anticipated that this exercise will be completed by April 28, 2006. Once this exercise is complete, USCIS will be able to extract data relating to the priority date, country of chargeability and preference classification. USCIS has already entered into discussions with the Department of State to provide this detailed information not only for pending workload but for visa regressed cases as well to allow DOS to accurately manage future visa allocations in regressed workloads."

[updated]
http://www.aila.org/content/fileview...&linkid=162315

so are we getting anything different from what the ombudsman has already requested (and received?)

Didn't we request for the same information, other than priority date stuff, that Ombudsman was looking for in 2006, does anybody know whether CIS provided him what he requested for?

Can't they reuse the same "program", as they call it, to provide us the info that we requested for? I would suggest to atleast include a reference to this Ombudsman's request in our reply letter.

I am in for contribution too.

[newuser]

I am ready to pitch in my contribution

[logiclife]

Guys, let me say something here.

$5000 for one query is not an unfair amount of money. The reason I say this is because I know a thing or two about writing quality queries, I have done that for the last 6 years of my 9 year career querying the heck out of Oracle CRM.

It does take time to write queries and the time it takes depends on how many pieces of information you want to bring together. The wider your spreadsheet is for the final output, the more islands of data need to be connected to fetch that output. Those who are familiar with SQL would know that I am talking about going thru potentially 20-25 tables and joining them to get data. This is probably not going to be a select * from 485_cases kind of query. If it takes 100 hours of time to write such a query, at $50 per hour of programming time, it could be 5000. Most likely it may be fewer hours if they have a programmer with knowledge on staff.

The problem here is not 5000 dollars. The problem here is that the situation is hopeless because they dont assign country of chargeability to pending 485 cases up until they are ready to approve them, if I read it correctly. The data that is not captured is the data that cannot be queried, simple as that.

And on that note, thanks to "Needhelp!" for shining some light on USCIS process thru her FOIA.

[dummgelauft]

While it is terrible on the part of USCIS to do so, but I believe, we have an opportunity to at least get a clear picture of what is going on in USCIS.
Count me in for a contribution.
IV Core, please set up a thread to colllect votes for this, give a time frame of 10 days to vote. Then divide equally, the $5000.0 among all those who vote "yes" for obataining this info.
This is official robbery/bribery, but is our best bet, as of now.

[logiclife]

Based on the reply to this FOIA from Needhelp!, it seems that we have a bigger problem than transparency.

They have said that country of chargeability is not assigned until case is ready for approval. However, whether or not a case is ready for approval is determined by country of chargeability. If you have 500,000 pending cases and dont know how many cases for each country of chargeability, then the only way to respond to a visa bulletin is to go thru all 500,000 cases every month, take a peek in it, look at the PD, look at the country and see if it is up for approval. I dont think they are doing that.

Also, if priority date is something that is different for different countries, then cases for those countries have to be sorted by priority date in different silos, so that when the next bulletin comes, you know how many cases are eligible that month and which ones are the earliest cases (from PD perspective) for each country.

[pappu]

Originally Posted by gapala

Didn't we request for the same information, other than priority date stuff, that Ombudsman was looking for in 2006, does anybody know whether CIS provided him what he requested for?

Can't they reuse the same "program", as they call it, to provide us the info that we requested for? I would suggest to atleast include a reference to this Ombudsman's request in our reply letter.

I am in for contribution too.

I suggest, some of us send another email asking Ombudsman about this. Let us see what kind of response we get. It will be helpful to find if they got the data they requested in 2004. If they have not got it in about 4-5 years, are we also going to wait for a long time to get the data?

[Nil]

Thanks to all of you who had taken the initiative and now sharing the results. This is far more substantial than blaming individual groups for backlog creation (that was ridiculous in this forum). Not sure why we MUST shell out whatever money they demand. IV core, kindly comment.

[chanduv23]

Originally Posted by logiclife

The problem here is not 5000 dollars. The problem here is that the situation is hopeless because they dont assign country of chargeability to pending 485 cases up until they are ready to approve them, if I read it correctly. The data that is not captured is the data that cannot be queried, simple as that.

.

So how do they say they have a project manager and this project manager is now accurate in moving dates so there wont be any more back and forth date moment but a steady moment? Is there some kind of guess work based on different data collected?