Interviewer: If I had to somewhat apply for deferred action, what kind of forms do I need to submit?
Jeanne Morales: There is a specific form for it, but one thing I would want people to understand is that for most of the benefits in immigration, whether it’s getting the green card or naturalizing or anything like that, there’s a form. Getting a waiver for a certain past conduct, there’s a form, and the forms are available online. Too many people think that that’s it. You download a form, fill it out and send it in.
In all immigration benefits you have to have evidence to support, like in DACA that you were here since 2007, that you have a high school diploma, and that you were here before your 16th birthday. All of that has to be supported by evidence. When we prepare a DACA for somebody, not only do we fill out their form, that’s probably the least hard thing to do.
Our DACA packages are generally two or three inches thick because we have to have evidence that they’ve been here, and that they are still in school, or if they did go to school, school records are a part of that. It would be very difficult if you went to school in Omaha, Nebraska and you have school records showing from kindergarten on that you were in Omaha, Nebraska. That’s a pretty good form of evidence that you lived in the United States during that period of time. It’s not like you cut across the border, found a school and then crossed back and your residence was somewhere else. Do you see my point?
For everything like that we help people investigate their backgrounds so that we can determine whether or not they have those significant misdemeanors. All of that needs to be put together in a way, in a fashion, that makes it more likely that it will go through the process. We’ve submitted packages for people, especially at the beginning when it first started, where they were approved within 3 months. We’ve also had a package that took over a year. We get the packages set up in a way to get them through as fast as possible. And the one that took a year, there were a couple of issues I’m sure that the government was researching on.
But if that person had just filled out the form and sent it, it never would have gotten approved. Our value added was moving it from never getting approved to, yeah, it took a year, but it did eventually get approved.
