USCIS

For the record, I do not have much love and affection for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. Lot's of robot sounding people with way too much power.

As part of the adoption process you have to get fingerprinted by USCIS in order to get approved. We had noticed that this step seemed to really hold people up. We already were done with our dossier other than our approval from USCIS. We had decided that we would try to get fingerprinted early to try and speed things up. We had read by other families that have tried and it seemed like everyone had really mixed experiences. Some would rudely get turned away, while others just walked right in and get them taken right away. We didn't really know what to expect. So the day after our appointment date came in the mail we decided to at least try. We packed up the boys, brought toys, snacks, anything that would keep them quiet and occupied and drove into Portland. We walked in and the place was packed. The greeter lady was pretty short with us, took our info and made us sit down. We said we would happily wait as long as it took if they could get us in. A not so nice lady came out of an office and told us to not try, that it wasn't going to happen for us to get fingerprinted early, and just come back on our appointed day. Bummer. We were pretty disappointed. We drove home pretty disheartened.

We decided to try again, two days later. We switched things up a bit. Jamie got off work earlier than the time before, and we were blessed to have Jamie's cousin watch the boys so we wouldn't have to take them this time. We choose to make it a 'date' we brought our books and thought it would be fun to just sit and wait out the hours with each other and our reading material. We showed up at 2:30, prayed quickly in the car and walked in. We were greeted by the same front desk lady, but the room was pretty empty. She took our info again, told us to sit down and wait to talk to someone. About a minute later a younger (and much nicer) lady came out of the office and said she would love to fit us in. She seemed to be really excited about adoption in general and told us to sit back down to wait. As soon as we sat down it was our turn to get fingerprinted. At that point I was internally screaming "YOU HAVE TO BE JOKING ME?! THIS IS AMAZING! GOD YOU ARE SOOO GOOD!!!!" By the time we were done and sitting back in the car it was 2:40...10 minutes after we got there.

Amazing, right? As it turns out, we received the final approval letter in the mail the very day of our original fingerprinting date.

So, my advice for those of you in the adoption process and have yet to do this step, just keep trying! It was SO worth it for us to have Jamie take a half of day off of work to go down there. I guess 2:30 is a really good time for the Portland office, they close at 4:00, but don't book appointments past 3:00 (i think). If it's going slow and they don't have any more appointments then they will close up early, at least that's what the lady said. So we got there right before the fingerprinting guy was getting ready to leave, he just led us back, took our fingerprints and left.


How it worked for us:
*We applied for the I600A, Petition To Adopt A Orphan - Ours was sent November 19th, 2010
*We received a notice to let us know they got our application (sent from them November 26th, 2010)
*Then we got a appointment date (ours was for January 3rd, 2011. It was sent from them December 9th, 2010)
*We got fingerprinted early on December 17th, 2010
*We called countless times, and e-mailed to check the status of our case
*We received our approval letter on January 3rd, 2011, the same day of our original appointment date.