Recapturing Priority Dates | EB-3

I have a previous Petitioner with an I-140 approved, is it possible to recapture? Chris, can you take us through that process of recapture if somebody had a previous petition? How, how do they go about recapturing it? Also, what happens if they know that their petition was approved from years ago, but they have no documentation? What can be done?

Good question. If you have a priority date, you can recapture it in a future priority date. That's important, because that allows you to leverage that old priority.

So for instance, we see this sometimes with Indian nationals who maybe had a nursing case applied 10 years ago, that 10 years can be the difference between your case essentially being current today and you having to wait until the January 2014 date becomes current, the way you were captured is actually pretty straightforward, you include a copy of the old I-140 in the new I-140 petition, so you have old I-140 approval notice from let's say 2010, you include that in your 2021 petition, we usually put in a couple of paragraphs in a supporting letter for mining the USCIS that recapture as possible and then when the approval notice is granted in 2021, it will actually even though it will say case was filed September of 2021.

However, the priority date might be January of 2010, or whenever it was. So that's the easiest way is to have a copy of your I-140. If you don't have a copy of your I-140. My advice is the first thing you do is you get your get in contact with your old attorney who prepared the case 10 years ago, or at the very least you get in touch with your old employer. Maybe even your recruiter has a copy of it.

So that that is ultimately the best evidence you have. We do see Tanya from time to time that no one seems to have a copy of it.

First thing that does is it does raise the question as to whether or not your case was actually approved as an I-140. It's unfortunate, but from time to time, we will get a client Tanya a nurse, and she'll say, Oh, I had a case approved 10 years ago and nobody seems to have a copy of it. Ultimately, it comes out that actually their case wasn't filed either. Either the nurse was sometimes mistaken. She believed that just by submitting documents, that would mean that it was filed.

In other instances, unfortunately, someone misrepresented or even outright lied to her that a case was filed and approved in those situations are obviously terrible. As a last ditch effort, if nobody has any of those evidence, pieces of evidence, what we can do is we can file a Freedom of Information Act, we do this with some frequency around here. It's not a terribly difficult process. and I would say half the time we're able to uncover what it is as a filing with the USCIS where we say we think this thing happened in the past. If so, can you give us an a new copy of that, the I-140. I don't have any scientific numbers on it. We don't track it that closely. But my sense is roughly half of those results in the USCIS. Here's a copy of your I-140 and then we just submit that in with the new I-140 filing.

I would agree with you in that kind of ratio, because I would say probably about half of the people that we have helped to do the FOIA the Freedom of Information Act, have come back with an answer. So that kind of fits in with what we're seeing as well.