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I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

257 points proberts | 1 comments | 16 May 25 15:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.374s | source

I'll be here for the next 5-6 hours. As usual, there are countless topics given the rapidly changing immigration landscape and I'll be guided by whatever you're concerned with. Please remember that I can't provide legal advice on specific cases because I won't have access to all the facts. Please stick to a factual discussion in your questions and I'll try to do the same in my answers.

Edit: I am taking a break now and will return later this afternoon/evening to respond to any comments and answer any questions. Thank you everyone for a great and engaged AMA so far.

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argo_cve ◴[16 May 25 18:46 UTC] No.44008652[source]▶
Hi Peter. I am a Lead Computer Vision Engineer, working remotely at Veryfi (YC 17). I am a citizen of Russia, living in Armenia for last 3 years.

We applied to O1 visa, got approval from the USCIS, then got visa stamps and at the day of my flight visas were revoked. Embassy said to reapply - I did and now it's been 11 months of Administrative processing (as they said in the DoS).

My employer tried writing to the Congressman's office couple times, but every time Embassy answers ~"please wait, no timelines". I also filed a DHS Trip complaint and received this statement: "We have made any corrections to records that our inquiries determined were necessary, including, as appropriate, notations that may assist in avoiding incidents of misidentification".

With everything above, we were not able to get any meaningful timelines or figure what's going on. Is there anything we can do to make movement in my case? It's hard to plan your life living like this, so it is very important for me. Thanks!

replies(4): >>44011169 #>>44012906 #>>44014191 #>>44041656 #
1. morpheuskafka ◴[17 May 25 08:29 UTC] No.44012906[source]▶
It’s doubtful you’ll get any answers. Lawyers are of little help due to “consular nonreviewability” and your case clearly has hit some sort of national security flag. Since this was pre Trump II, it likely was a real human review not their new approach of automated revocations for poorly designed queries (a student was recently revoked due to fishing license citations).

As I understand, AP generally means Washington and not the consulate is actually the block/decision maker now, but they wouldn’t even officially tell you that. It could be with State or they could be waiting an opinion from someone. Picture some CIA agent who got stuck with a boring desk job and has a stack of thousands of visas to research.