Practice area
Individual Immigration
People of all cultures, creeds and ethnicities choose to live in the United States for a variety of reasons. Elizabeth assists individuals from all corners of the world in obtaining government approval to make living in the USA a reality.
Chapter 01
Starting from where your case actually is
People rarely arrive at an immigration lawyer at the beginning. They arrive mid way through, often after a refusal, a notice they did not expect, or advice from somebody who was confident and wrong. One client wrote publicly that they had been advised by six immigration attorneys before starting work with Elizabeth in 2007.
So the first job is usually not to file anything. It is to establish what has already happened, what is on the record, and what the government currently believes about you. That is unglamorous work and it is the only honest place to start, because a plan built on a half remembered history tends to fail in the same place twice.
A single chair turned toward a window with fine blinds in a still, empty office
What the government is asking you to prove
Almost every individual matter comes down to establishing a small number of facts to somebody who has never met you. Who you are. What your relationship to another person is, or what your work is. That what you have said at different times to different parts of the government holds together.
Most of the preparation is therefore evidence, not argument, and much of it is ordinary life turned into documents. Elizabeth's job is to tell you which of it actually matters, which of it does not, and what to do about the gaps that every real life contains. What she will not do is tell you an outcome is certain, because it is not in her gift to give.
Chapter 03
The waiting, and what moves during it
The hardest part of an individual case is usually the months in which nothing visible happens. Meanwhile things do move: processing times shift, policy shifts, and a case that was straightforward when it was filed can sit inside a changed landscape by the time it is looked at.
One client's published account of working with Elizabeth put it as watching the political climate and always giving you the straight answer. That is the intent here. You should hear what has genuinely changed and what it means for your matter, rather than either false reassurance or alarm.
Keeping a family's filings aligned with each other
Families are rarely one case. A spouse, children, a parent, sometimes somebody still abroad, and each with their own status, their own dates and their own filing. They interact. A change in one person's status can alter what is available to another, and a child's age can quietly close a route that was open last year.
Elizabeth's published client accounts describe families kept together and cases carried over many years. Practically, the work is holding the whole picture at once rather than treating each filing as a separate errand, so that solving one person's problem does not create the next one.
Streefland Law. Licensed in Minnesota and before the federal immigration agencies and courts. Call (612) 789-0379.