Senator
Dianne Feinstein
One Post Street, Suite 2450
San Francisco, CA 94104
Re:
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Administrative Review
of Approved I-129F
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Petitioner:
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Andrew DeFaria
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Beneficiary:
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Olga Fedoryaka
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CSC File #:
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WAC0101653678
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Case ID #:
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WRW2001009031
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Dear Senator Diane Feinstein,
I beg of you to please hear my story and to help me.
At this point you are about the last person who I can turn to for such help.
As a compassionate human being I beg of you to help me. Please do not turn
away from me and cause me continuing pain and heartache! A short and simple
letter from you to the right person can ease my suffering and help right a
wrong that I feel is being done to me, putting myself and my family through
much pain, frustration and anguish and unite a family, which has been something
I've been trying to do for many years now.
My problem is that my petition for my fiancée is
in a bueacratic black hole. I followed all the proper procedures and my petition
was approved, way back on the 2nd of January, 2001. We had disclosed all of
the information required, we have never hid anything and we have been truthful.
But at the Warsaw embassy interview in April 2001 the consular decided to
send the petition back to California for "administrative review". I have
been trying to no avail since then to get information, any information from
both the embassy and the INS. The embassy is very vague about the problem.
Your office did manage to get some information from them and I thank you for
that. But I have not heard from the INS at all since January! Not one response.
Not a letter. Nothing. And there is no way for me to contact them. There
is only one phone number and it's busy all day. One day in May, when I was
unemployed (and almost lost my house) I dialed and redialed for 3 hours straight
finally managing to get through only to hear "I'm sorry but your petition
is not in our computer". I finally got a job and I can't spend 3 hours dialing
the INS during work if I want to keep my house.
After talking to another immigration attorney recently
I was told that it may take an additional 18 months! My fiancée and
I are being kept apart by my own government for possibly 2 years! The attorney
tells me that such cases are not a high priority for the INS. I can assure
you that this case is indeed a high priority for me and my family. It seems
almost criminal to keep two people destined to become a loving family from
each other simply because of beaucratic red tape for such a long period of
time.
The consular seems to be questioning my fiancée's
former marriages as possibly being fraudulent. I have managed to obtain the
files for both me and my fiancée through the Freedom of Information
Act and had gone over these files with an immigration attorney. We cannot
find anything in the record to substantiate a claim of fraudulent marriage.
I have also talked on the phone with my fiancée's former husbands
and neither of them feel that their prior marriage to my fiancée was
fraudulent. In other words nobody involved believes that fraud occurred and
there is nothing in the record to suggest that it did. But my petition is
stuck at the California Service Center and may not even be looked at for
another year! I'm certain if the INS would just look at my case they can
easily determine that my petition should be reaffirmed and moved on but I
wait because nobody cares and there is no mechansim for me to get any service
from the service center. There is no way for me to get some action on this.
But if you wrote a simple letter to them I'm positive that this would get
some action. Would you please, please help me here? I beg of you. If you
do help I'd even name my next daughter Diane!
To get a little bit of an idea of how this feels picture
your loved ones separated from you, in a foriegn country, forced to live on
a farm with an outhouse and no running hot water. They have no job because
it's next to impossible to find work in that country. They cannot call you.
You can only call them and that is your only means of relating to them. They
will be stuck there for years because your government will not let them come
here. They cannot get a tourist visa to visit here, tourist visas are rarely
given out. You have limited funds and cannot easily travel there to visit
them. And there is nothing really wrong with your wishes to get them back,
it's just that your government decides that your request is not important
to them and you'll just have to wait another year or two. How can the government
say they believe in family values when they keep families apart?
Again, I beg of you to please take a few moments to send
a letter to the INS asking them to process my case and to respond to me.
I am not asking you to ask them to approve me, just to process the case on
it's own merits. I agree with you about visas, foreigners and terrorists but
this is not a terrorist situation - this is a family visa issue. This is
an act of uniting a family.
Very truly yours,
Andrew DeFaria