Our "proof of legitimate marriage" file (5 affidavits, financial documents, insurance papers, about 2 inches thick total) was fortunately the only file lost during the process.
Having an effective attorney who knew how to barge in during INS lunch hours was our only salvation.
When I was at Immigration & Naturalization, the "asylum office" in Chicago had a record of accepting 8% of all applicants for asylum, rejecting 92% of them.
But then, of those who filed judicial appeals (which is apart from the process), at a great cost of money and time to themselves, upon judicial review, 91% of those applicants for asylum, who had been rejected by the bureaucrats, were accepted.
This is a travesty.
The laws of immigration are essentially straightforward and clear; probably even an 8th-graduate can understand them. It is easy, to go up-and-down the list, figuring if this thing applies, and this other thing does not--a computer can do it.
So why do we have all these $75,000+ per year asylum examiners, if a computer could do it--and a computer, if instructed, WOULD do it.
As an aside, I am familiar with cases such as yours; the Lincoln (Nebraska) office of Immigration & Naturalization, when I left there in 1997, had over 8,000,000--I repeat that, and this is a SMALL office; 8,000,000--documents that were not matched with files.
These were not unidentifiable pieces of paper; it was just that there was no interest in physically getting them with their proper files.