Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Question About Police Clearance

Alycia Goody asks,

Can you please clarify what is required for the Police clearance for the dossier? Is there a need to include FBI prints, or will a local statement be acceptable?
Thanks you.
Alycia, you may have to get several sets of fingerprints. First, there will probably be a set that will be required for your homestudy. That will come from your state dept. of criminal investigation (whatever it is called where you live). That one will probably be ordered by your social worker and he/she/they will "own" the result. Then, you will need FBI fingerprints which are required for your I-600A, and thus, your I-171H. Finally, you will need a statement in your dossier itself, stating that you have no criminal background. So you will almost surely be getting a set of prints for that. I asked our State, if we just did our fingerprints for the homestudy, why do we have to redo them 2 months later? Their reply was that they destroy the prints after mailing the certification out.

Then, if you're like us, you might get to do 3 dossiers because of expiring, in which case you get to do the fingerprinting two more times besides these. What a pain that was for us.

As far as the Police Clearance, specifically, it will be a certified statement from the State, stating that you have no criminal past. It must be certified, equivalent to notorizing, otherwise you won't be able to get it apostilled.

Hope this helps!

1 comment:

The McEacherns said...

If I may, Alan, I might add that some states actually will not provide such a letter, as is the case here in AZ. We had to send prints to the FBI, they stamp them "No Arrest Record" and mail them back to us. We attach a notarized statement saying that our state does not provide clearance letters persuant to such-and-such law. Our facilitator has said this is fine, and the SDA accepted our dossier for registration. Just wanted to point out that the procedure can really differ by state!