RFE's Aren't Really All That Mysterious

With great respect for his excellent article, and a recommendation to ii - “RFE - The Acronym that Continues to Confound and Bewilder Practitioners” - I respond to Attorney Vaman Kidambi https://thinkimmigration.org/blog/2022/11/30/rfe-the-acronym-that-continues-to-confound-and-bewilder-practitioners/?utm_source=Recent%20Postings%20Alert&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=RP%20Daily

I start by acknowledging that USCIS has quality control issues. The talent pool among adjudicators is very uneven. However, cases are often unique. There may be a reason that a request is made in one RFE that appears not to be relevant to another RFE author. There are things that one adjudicator may find relevant to his assessment of the proof that strike a different adjudicator differently, based on her experience. And that is OK, and unavoidable. One cannot expect uniformity across all desks of a sprawling overwhelmed service like USCIS. If all petitioners are individuals, so should their adjudication.

Often, when writing RFEs, I might have had a hunch or a suspicion about something that is would not be obvious if that RFE were compared to others that even I wrote. So, theoretically, a question about an issue might be less relevant in one case, but more relevant in another because of a peripheral matter that the adjudicator won’t even mention, of fear of tipping off the petitioner. Adjudicators are taught, and do well to remember, that, if they give a petitioner a roadmap to approval, the petitioner will follow it, even if they need to make up facts and falsify documents to do it.

Mr. Kidambi’s comments on behalf of the industry are well received, but the most important thing when responding to an RFE is to try to get inside the author’s head and address the real problem. The recipient of an RFE will not get that insight from a cookie-cutter, crank ‘em out high volume law firm.