Lubbock County · FOIA and Record Review
Your file already exists.
Asking to read it
does not create it.
Somebody at church told you to pedir su expediente, and the words landed like a dare. You have been careful for fifteen years. Careful has worked.
So here is the part nobody says out loud. You are not afraid the file will be empty. You are afraid it will say something. A border station twenty years ago. A paper you signed in a language you could not read. A man in a strip-mall office who took nine hundred dollars and may never have filed anything at all.
The record is already written. The only question left is who reads it first.
806-799-3379The definition, in plain words
A records request is a request under the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552, for the files the United States government already keeps on you. No case is required. No lawyer is required. There is no hearing, no interview, no biometrics and no office to drive to.
But a FOIA is not one request. It is up to four, to four different agencies:
| USCIS | Your A-File. Applications, interviews, decisions. Requested online. Form G-639 is optional, not required. |
|---|---|
| EOIR | Your immigration court file. This is the Justice Department. It is not Homeland Security, and it takes its own separate request. |
| CBP | Entries, exits, your I-94, inspections, apprehensions, expedited removal. |
| ICE | Removal and enforcement records. |
Most people who tell me they “did a FOIA” asked one agency out of four.
Not our opinion. The Justice Department publishes it on its own request page, in capital letters: “The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) is NOT part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Requests regarding applications filed with DHS should not be made with EOIR and DHS forms should not be used to request records from EOIR.”
Read that as a sentence about your life. A removal order lives in a Justice Department file and will never appear in a Homeland Security file. So a clean A-File can still be half a record, and the missing half is an automatic disqualification from the I-601A waiver.
What waiting actually costs
Nothing about your record changes while you decide. That is the honest part, and it is why the pressure on this page is low. But three things do change.
- The wrong case gets built on top of it. A firm that never pulled your court file can still take a retainer, open a waiver campaign and spend a year and five figures of your money on a case that a single request would have shown was blocked from the start. That is the most expensive mistake in this practice and it is entirely preventable.
- The people who remember get older. The cousin who drove you. The aunt who kept the envelope. Whoever filed something for you in 1998 and never explained what it was. INA § 245(i) can still matter if a qualifying petition was filed on or before April 30, 2001, and the only people who know are the ones you can still call.
- You keep making decisions blind. Whether to travel. Whether to take the better job with the I-9. Whether to tell your daughter. Every one of those is a guess right now, and the answer is sitting in a file with your name on it.
How a real record review runs
- The free phone call, first. EOIR Automated Case Information, 1-800-898-7180, takes your A-number and tells you whether you have a case in immigration court. It costs nothing and you do not need a lawyer to use it. The limit travels with it: it will not show a hearing date the court has not set yet, and the court’s own notices remain the official source.
- Print your I-94 free. Most electronic entries are retrievable at i94.cbp.dhs.gov at no charge. If yours is there, you do not need to file anything or pay anyone.
- Decide which agencies actually hold your answer. This is the step the market skips. A twenty-year-old border turnaround could be an expedited removal, a voluntary return, a withdrawal of an application for admission, or nothing at all, and those four live in different places.
- File the requests, separately. USCIS publishes that it will reject a single request covering more than one person, even a husband and wife, and make you resubmit. Families here file everything as a household. This one you cannot.
- Wait out the statutory clock. The agency has twenty working days to determine whether it will comply, extendable by written notice by no more than ten more. Working days, not calendar days. Anything past that is backlog, and backlog has its own remedies.
- Read it with someone who has read hundreds. A Form I-213 is a narrative written by an officer about you, years ago, and what it says is not always what happened. That reading is the service. The request is just how the paper arrives.
Why this office
I am Gilda McDowell. I have been licensed in Texas since 2009, Bar No. 24063561, and this office has been open in Lubbock since January 2010. You can verify both in about thirty seconds and you should, with me and with anyone else you are considering.
Here is the part that matters more than the credential. The last person who took your money may not have been a lawyer at all. In this country there are exactly two categories of people permitted to represent you before immigration authorities: attorneys licensed by a state bar, and representatives accredited through the Justice Department’s Recognition and Accreditation Program. A notario is neither. A consultant is neither. A cousin with a laptop is neither.
So this page hands you two free federal tools before it asks you for anything, and it tells you the honest limit on both. A firm that tells you what not to pay for has earned the right to tell you what is worth paying for.
I do not measure this by how fast the paper comes back. I measure it by whether you finally know what you are standing on.
The whole practice is built for the person on the other side of that sentence. Immigrant-led, bilingual, and small on purpose.
The words you will hear
A-File
Your Alien Registration File, held by USCIS. Everything ever filed for you or against you on the benefits side. It is also, by the government’s own description, a record shared with ICE and CBP.
Record of Proceedings, or ROP
The immigration court’s file. Held by EOIR at the Justice Department. Under 8 CFR § 1003.36 the court creates and controls it, which means you get it by requesting it, not by being entitled to it. There is a federal case, Dent v. Holder, 627 F.3d 365 (9th Cir. 2010), holding that a person already in removal proceedings has a statutory right of access to the A-File. Read the limits before you rely on it: it is the Ninth Circuit, it does not bind Texas or New Mexico, and it runs only during proceedings against you.
A-Number
The nine-digit number the government uses for you. It appears on almost anything DHS has ever mailed you. Without it the free court hotline cannot look you up.
Form I-213
Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien. An officer’s written narrative of an encounter. When people are surprised by their own file, this is usually the page that surprises them.
Form G-639
The USCIS FOIA form. Widely sold as mandatory. It is optional.
Questions people actually ask me
Look, a records request does not create a new enforcement referral. But the A-File is held jointly by USCIS, ICE and CBP, and DHS components may share records internally on a need-to-know basis. Talk to a lawyer before you request.
Two national firms state flatly that USCIS shares FOIA requests with ICE. That is not supported as written. The exposure, where it exists, comes from the file already being a shared record, not from the act of asking. For VAWA, T and U clients, federal law runs the other way.
Call 1-800-898-7180 with your A-number. It is the Justice Department’s automated case information line, it is free, and you do not need a lawyer.
It reports immigration court cases only. It will not tell you what the order says, what it was based on, or what it does to a future filing. That is what the record answers.
Twenty working days for the agency to determine whether it will comply, extendable by written notice by no more than ten more.
Working days, not calendar days. Every page that answers in weeks is guessing. Delivery often runs longer, and that gap has a name and a remedy.
The reality is it depends on what they wrote down, and there are four very different possibilities.
An expedited removal, a voluntary return, a withdrawal of an application for admission, or a night nobody documented. One blocks a waiver. One is almost nothing. You cannot tell from memory and neither can I.
It is in the A-File. Approved, denied, abandoned or fraudulent, it is there.
This is the most common reason a case that should work does not. The person who filed it is usually not answering the phone anymore.
No. USCIS publishes that it will reject a single request covering multiple people, even relatives, and require you to resubmit separately.
A quiet six-week delay nobody warns you about. Two people, two requests.
For most electronic entries, nothing. It is retrievable and printable free at i94.cbp.dhs.gov.
Paying to replace one you could print wastes the fee and months. What retrieval cannot tell you is what that entry means for the rest of your case.
Before you call
This is the smallest first step in the practice, and that is on purpose.
You are not hiring me for a case. You are finding out whether you have one. Those are different conversations and this is the first one.
Here is what happens. I ask how you entered, what has ever been filed for you or against you, whether anything happened at a border, and whether anyone filed something on or before April 30, 2001. By the end you will know which agencies actually hold your answer, which steps cost nothing, and what a full review would cost if you want one.
If the free steps answer your question, I will tell you that and you will owe me nothing.
You have been guessing for fifteen years.
Let’s go read it.
One conversation tells you where your record lives, which parts are free, and what it takes to see all of it.
Get My Free Assessment → 806-799-3379Confidential. No pressure. No obligation.
Serving Lubbock, Plainview, Levelland, Brownfield, Seminole and Hobbs.