How Many USCIS Agents Does It Take To Collect Fingerprints?

The ordeal with my wife's green card continues. Last week, on April 1st of all days, I received an email from Representative Roby's office notifying me that they had received a status letter on my wife's case. The woman that emailed me said that she was sending a copy of the notification to my wife. This was just a notification from USCIS notifying my wife that they had received the latest application. (the third application since March 2014 by the way, but I digress)

The reason this is going through our Rep's office is just to have some assurances in case another card gets lost in the mail. I'm not sure what course of action can be taken if it does get lost, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there. Regardless, since the card will ultimately be sent to that address, all correspondence is going there as well.

So yesterday, April 6th, 2015, I received another email from the Rep's office with an attachment. The attachment was a poorly scanned image of another notification from USCIS. The notification was for an appointment they had made for her to come to Birmingham to once again collect biometrics. The only biometrics in this case is the collection of fingerprints. The Birmingham office is 173 miles from our house according to Google Maps, so it is roughly 3 hours one-way to conduct an appointment that lasts about 10 minutes. We know that it takes 10 minutes because we just went to this very office in March of last year, when they successfully collected my wife's fingerprints.

This brings me to a few questions: Why would an agency collect fingerprints? What would one expect might become of these fingerprints once they have been collected? One might assume that they would be kept on file somewhere for possible future reference, or what would be the point of collecting them in the first place? Yet here we are 13 months after the most recent collection of the fingerprints, and we have been given another appointment to drive 173 miles to do it again. Wouldn't it be more effective to simply check to ensure that the fingerprints from last year were still on file? After all, this most recent request was sent to USCIS with the documents showing that they had approved the request from last year, so it must mean that the fingerprints were successfully collected.

Part of the $450 fee sent in with this request included $80 for the biometrics, so if it was a matter of money, this should have satisfied any financial reasons for not using the other set of fingerprints for this case, since I was refunded the original fees by Chase Bank. Certainly this isn't the reason, and I don't suspect that USCIS even knows that we were refunded the original fees.

But none of that matters. It would be more cost effective for them to use the old fingerprints anyway. They wouldn't have to take the time to schedule the appointment, have the agent physically collect the prints, and store them, etc. The work has already been done. Simply verify they are still in the system, and no other work is required, other than printing the new card and mailing it. Of course, this could have been done months ago when we sent in the second application notifying them that we never received the card, but apparently the law does not allow this sort of common sense to ensue.

To top all of this off, the attachment that I received via email looks as though it was scanned with an old mimeograph machine. The woman that sent it to me also mailed the original to our home, so hopefully it will arrive on time, since this document is required at the appointment. Getting a piece of mail seems like a rather simple thing to hope for, but lost mail is the reason we're at this point in the first place. But the attachment is incredibly poor as I've said. I'll attach a few portions of this document to illustrate the poor quality of the attachment:

Zoomed 300%

Original size

I am going to print this as a back-up plan for the appointment on Tuesday, but hopefully we won't have to resort to using it. It would be rather embarrassing. I just can't fathom how anyone could scan something and think this is high enough quality to send...and coming from a Representative of Congress' Office on top of that?

Hopefully Tuesday will bring good news. I'm hoping that the office in Birmingham will extend the expiration of my wife's now expired green card. Last March when we were there, they put a sticker on the card that extended it out several months. I'm still hopeful of going on a cruise in September with some friends of mine from Desert Storm, but until this mess gets straightened out, we can't really make plans.

And so we wait...