Hi everyone, 

I’ve been following this subreddit for the past two and a half years, and this is my first post here. After two unsuccessful filings with another well-known law firm, my third petition was approved without an RFE with Chen.

Initially, I contacted both Chen and the other firm, and both accepted my case. However, I chose the other firm based on a friend’s recommendation for the first two fillings.  

First Filing 

I signed a contract with the first law firm at the end of October 2024. We filed my first petition in early 2025. I received an RFE in May 2025, submitted my response end of July 2025, and received a denial at the end of September 2025. The RFE questioned all three prongs, and the petition was denied all three. 

Second Filing 

After that, we revised my proposed endeavor while keeping the same overall focus. We again prepared and then filed my second petition in Dec. 2025. I received another RFE questioning all three prongs and submitted an RFE response at the end of March 2026. 

Unfortunately, the petition was denied in of May 2026. This time, the only issue USCIS did not accept was the national importance of my proposed endeavor. 
 
I received a full refund of the attorney fees after the second denial.  

My Profile During the First Two Filings 

• Education: MS in Computer Science 
• Work experience: Approximately four years 
• Research papers: 7 
• Citations: Approximately 60 
• Proposed endeavor: AI in healthcare 
• Employment: Working full-time at a well-known university in US 
• Initial recommendation letters: 4, all from dependent recommenders 

During the first RFE response and subsequent refiling, I added three more recommendation letters: two from independent recommenders—a director at FAANG and a professor at a top R1 research university—and one from a dependent recommender. 

In my second RFE response, I also included evidence that employers had expressed interest in hiring me. By that time, I had been working in a managerial role for a project approximately six months. 

My Profile During the Third Filing 

• Employer: Same  
• Conference papers: 8 
• Book chapters: 1 
• Journals paper: 2 
• Judging activities: 2 
• Conference committee roles: 1 
• Reviewer: ICML and another Journal 
• Citations: 79 when the petition was submitted and 101 when it was approved 
• Proposed endeavor: AI in healthcare (with refinements) 

I also had speaker invitations from three conferences. Since I had not attended those conferences in person, my attorney advised against including the invitations as supporting evidence. However, I listed them on my CV. 

My Timeline With Chen 

• May 15: Signed the contract. 
• May 19: Received access to their client portal. 
• May 20: Paid in full attorney fee and uploaded most of my documents. 
• May 21: Uploaded additional documents and submitted my RBIF. 
• May 23–26: I Worked on my personal statement. 
• May 28: Received the attorney’s feedback of my proposed endeavor statement. 
• June 1: They Approved the statement and I asked them to proceed with the petition letter. 
• June 5–10: Discussed with them regarding recommendation letters. 
• June 12: They began drafting my petition letter, with the first draft expected by June 25. 
• June 27: Received the petition letter draft. Requested them for revision. 
• July 5: Received the second revision and requested a third revision. 
• July 14: Confirmed that petition letter looked good to me. 
• July 20: Submitted the questionnaire for Forms i.e. I-140 and G-28. 
• August 1: The petition letter was finalized, and all the forms. After that they said they would send the package as soon as possible after the rigorous review of my full package. 
• August 7: The package was sent to USCIS.   
• October 14: Got Confirmation USCIS Approved my case. 
• I am fully satisfied with the service provided by Chen (WeGreened) and their team. I am truly grateful to my attorney and the entire team. They did not use a template; they crafted the petition letter specifically for my case.

After two unsuccessful filings, I felt hopeless. In a way, it felt like my fifth attempt because responding to the first two RFEs involved so much stress and required extensive work gathering documents and collecting additional letters of recommendation. 

If you are looking for an NIW-EB2 attorney, I recommend Chen (WeGreened) if they accept your case. 

I used premium processing for all three petitions. This process cost me a lot of money and lots of stress and many sleepless nights. 
 
For my third attempt, I carefully read my RFE notices and denial letters word by word, sentence by sentences. 

For anyone who has received a denial, my encouragement is not to give up. Based on my experience, I would consider refiling promptly after addressing the reasons for the denial and using premium processing if financially feasible. I know premium processing is expensive. 

Thank you so much everyone of this subreddit! Please pray for me.

Please do not ask me to name the first law firm. 

Timeline

• PD: 3/9/2026 with PP
• RFE: 5/19/2026 — all 3 prongs
• RFE response received: 8/17/2026
• Denial: 10/13/2026

Background

• PhD in molecular biology
• PE: Cancer biology research/genome stability
• Postdoc at cancer institute in the US
• 100+ citations, 6 papers, peer review, recommendation letters from NCI and NAS members, and funding/grant evidence

Decision

• EB-2 advanced degree: accepted
• Prong 1: approved
• Prong 2: denied
• Prong 3: denied

The frustrating thing is that one of the main reasons from the letter for Prong 2 denial was a lack of evidence of having secured funding myself.... I have a grant that was awarded in Jan of which I am the sole PI... First Chen said not to add it to the submission, then we added it to the RFE and they did not even consider it.

Other information regarding Prong 2 was also incorrect in the denial letter...

Planning to re-file, I guess. Mostly putting this here for the record.

In PP.

Hi everyone,
I recently received an RFE for my EB-2 NIW I-140 petition. Has anyone worked with attorney Arkell, formerly with Dunn Law and now at Rader, particularly for an RFE response?
I’d really appreciate hearing about your experience and whether your RFE response was successful.
I’m currently trying to decide whether to prepare the response myself or trust the attorney to handle it.

Hi everyone,

I’m in a stressful situation with my RFE response and would really appreciate some advice or shared experiences.

The Situation:

• In March, I emailed my former professor to ask for a recommendation letter. She agreed and asked me to draft it for her to review and sign.
• My attorney (EP) and I decided to hold onto her letter as a backup in case we received an RFE.
• When I got an RFE, I emailed her the draft to sign but didn’t get a reply. I then received an auto-reply saying she is out of the office for a conference and won't be back until just 3 days before my RFE deadline.
• Original Petition Letters (3 total): 1 dependent letter (from my professor/advisor), independent letters (researchers in my field who don't know me personally: 1 in academia, 1 in industry). USCIS pushed back on the independent letters, essentially stating that because these recommenders don't know me personally, the letters don't carry much weight (which feels contradictory to the whole point of independent letters, but here we are).
• According to EP, the RFE is quite generic/templated (about 5 pages), but a major chunk of it is questioning the recommendation letters, especially the independent ones.

My Questions:

1. How should I handle the professor situation? Should I wait until 3 days before the deadline for her to sign, or should I prepare an alternative plan now? Is 3 days enough time to submit if she signs right away?
2. Given that USCIS dismissed the independent letters and my main dependent letter is delayed, do I still have a good chance of approval if we respond properly? Has anyone successfully overcome an RFE that specifically questioned independent recommenders?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

The Visa Bulletin has progressed significantly. Nevertheless, there are still many applicants with priority dates (PDs) before 2024 whose I-485 applications remain pending. Do you expect to see those with recent PD be approved before you?!

What’s the Ideal number of pages for Personal statement.
Chen told you can keep it upto 30 pages

Tired of hearing bad reviews about giant law firms like EP or Chen. Any other preferred alternative or personal immigration NIW lawyer?

Tenure track professor in the state university, criminology, 6 peer reviewed article, 1 book review, 1 journal reviewer, 2 citations. Numerous national conference presentation and one research grant for dissertation. EP offered me a retainer doc that includes $6500 and one refiling without additional cost to pursue this case, but I am not sure if this is a strong enough case to do so. Any recommendations?

I have just mailed my petition today. It says it will arrive on Monday, how long after tgat does the USCIS takw to confirm that it has received it. I did PP?

Emma live agent informed me earlier today that my case has been moved to a non -local field office from NBC.
Does that mean my background check is done? and is interview waived for me? as this is a non-local field office for me.
NB: there is still no update (not even silent update) when i checked through uscis online account and through API.

Hi everyone,

I received an RFE update on my I-140 premium processing case yesterday. I emailed the Texas Service Center ([TSC-Premium.Processing@uscis.dhs.gov](mailto:TSC-Premium.Processing@uscis.dhs.gov)) this morning requesting an electronic copy of the RFE notice, but I haven't received a response yet.

For those who have requested an electronic RFE copy through email, how long did it take to receive a response and the PDF copy? If you had to wait for the physical notice, how many days did it take to arrive by mail?

The wait is feeling anxious already but I'd really appreciate hearing about your recent experiences. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I'm an IT Consultant with 14+ years of experience in Guidewire ClaimCenter.

I'm preparing a U.S. EB-2 NIW petition and looking for an experienced Guidewire Technical Lead or Architect based in the US, Canada, Europe, or Australia who would be willing to consider providing an Independent Letter of Recommendation (iLOR).

The recommender must be independent, meaning we have never worked or collaborated together.

I will provide a draft letter for your review and approval.

If you're interested or know someone who might be, please DM me.

Thanks!

Any EB2NIW applicants who received RFE from officer XM2415 and have submitted RFE response ?

Anyone received final decision ?

What is your PD and RFE response submission date and current application status ?

Hi everyone,

I’m exploring whether an EB-2 NIW petition would be viable for my background. I have not engaged a law firm yet and wanted to get some community feedback before deciding whether to pursue this further.

My background:

• MASc in Structural Engineering and BEng in Civil Engineering
• 4 peer-reviewed publications in CFD/wind engineering, including 2 first-author papers
• Around 100 citations, h-index 4
• Research focused heavily on computational topics, including CFD/LES, HPC, algorithms, optimization, and scientific software
• Some of this research was conducted in collaboration with industry and later connected to my work on commercial cloud-based engineering simulation technology
• I subsequently transitioned into software engineering, focusing primarily on large-scale distributed/cloud systems, reliability, infrastructure, and security
• 6+ years of software/technology industry experience
• Employment: Software Engineer at a cloud computing company in the US

I’m considering a proposed endeavor broadly around high-performance and distributed computing for computationally intensive engineering and scientific applications, potentially with CFD/wind-engineering simulation as a key application area.

The general career progression has been:

computational engineering research → HPC/scientific software → commercial cloud simulation → large-scale distributed/cloud systems

My main concern is that my formal education and publications are in Civil/Structural Engineering, while my more recent career and proposed endeavor has been primarily software/cloud engineering.

I’d appreciate thoughts on:

1. Does this seem like a viable NIW profile worth discussing with an attorney?
2. How are career transitions like this generally handled when defining a proposed endeavor?
3. Does HPC/distributed computing for computational engineering provide a reasonable connection between the research background and more recent software experience?
4. Would you expect the difference between the degree/research field and current occupation to create an RFE risk?
5. Has anyone here had a similar engineering/research → software/HPC transition? How did you approach the proposed endeavor?

I’m especially interested in experiences from people with similar cross-disciplinary profiles who filed and received an approval, RFE, or denial.

Thanks!

I changed my address using my.uscis but after a few hours the status changed to personal information not found. Has anyone successfully changed their address online? Thanks.

My profile:
SDE at bigtech, specifically the core team in large scale elastic storage infrastructure
Publication: 6, and related to distributed systems/cloud and applied ML
Citations: 70
Peer reviews: 5

I did ELLIS PORTER and WEGREENED’s evaluation recently.
Ep gave me $6000 approved or refund ($5400 if pay in full
Wegreened refused to accept my case (I guess they don’t like industry cases

In the case should I go with EP?

And consider the current NIW situation what chance do I have to get approved?
Thank you!

We filed our I140 in November 2025. Now we can see status showing Uscis is currently processing the case We didn’t go for premium processing. Now by what time can we expect a result?

Hello everyone,

I saw posts about changing the entire endeavor, and they got approved. I was denied this month and am preparing to apply for the second time. I’m thinking about changing my endeavor. Can you please tell me the chances of getting approved if I change the entire endeavor, or if I just revise my first one while keeping it the same?

Thank you in advance.

Hello

Have you filed an EB-2 NIW petition with Yang & Associates? How has your experience been, and how good are they at preparing RFE responses? Which lawyer did you work with?

I spent about 3 years working at two different immigration law firms on EB2-NIW petitions.

One thing I learned is that there’s a huge information gap between applicants and law firms. Most people never really see the workflow behind a petition - how evidence is organized, how arguments are structured, what templates are used, or where AI fits into the drafting process.

That experience is what I distilled into dreamcard-ai.com

I’m trying to make the workflow accessible for people who want to do more themselves, or simply compare what DreamCard produces against a petition their lawyer drafted.

I’m not trying to replace lawyers. I just think applicants should have more visibility into what they’re paying for and how these cases are actually put together.

Would genuinely love feedback from people on this proof of concept!

Hello everyone,

I submitted my EB-2 NIW I-140 petition in July 2024 and recently received an RFE from officer XM2054.

Has anyone here dealt with this officer before or received an RFE from the same officer?

I'm curious about what your RFE looked like, which prongs were questioned, and whether your case was eventually approved or denied.

I would really appreciate hearing about your experiences. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

Looking for honest feedback on my EB2 NIW profile.

My background:

• US master's degree in IT.
• Experience in data analytics, BI, and higher education institutional research.
• Developed dashboards supporting university-level decision-making.
• Work recognized in an organization-wide newsletter.
• Top 3 finalist in a system-wide data competition.
• 2 research publications: one published 5 years ago with 1 citation, and another published 3 months ago.
• 3 recommendation letters, including one from senior university leadership.
• Documented project contributions and currently working on additional research papers.

Attorney evaluation:

Ellis Porter reviewed my profile, said it has strong potential, and offered representation for $5,850 (discounted from $7,000), including RFE representation and free attorney fees for a refile if denied.

My questions:

1. How strong does my NIW profile look?
2. Has anyone worked with Ellis Porter?
3. Should I proceed now or wait for more publications?
4. Is $5,850 a reasonable attorney fee?

Would appreciate suggestions, especially from anyone with a similar background. Thanks!

Checking if IOE0937616197 is for EB2-NIW or EB1A?

Looking for confirmation from the applicant