When bureaucracy gives you something it shouldn't

Epistemic status: two cases and the statute behind them. The first case rests on one side's account in a lawyer's call-in video; I have not seen her file. I am not a lawyer. I could not find a base rate. AI use: a Codex session did the research: pulled the video captions, found the Policy Manual section and the Turfah opinion plus related cases, and summed the fiscal year 2025 totals from USCIS's spreadsheet. Claude then fact-checked every claim against the primary sources, proofread, and wrote the footnotes. The text and the opinions are mine. Bureaucracy is a complex and well-oiled machine. But the individual parts of it are still humans, who make mistakes. I stumbled upon this video, which I found an interesting example of this.[1]It is a conversation between an immigration attorney and a Canadian woman. She married an American citizen and applied for a green card because of that. However, for religious reasons she didn't want to get a tetanus shot. This was already surprising to me - I didn't know there was a religious exception to vaccination when immigrating to the US.[2]Her adviser at the time (not the attorney in the call, and not an attorney at all) told her that in order to achieve this she should apply as normal, without proof of vaccination. USCIS would then send her an RFE (request for evidence) for the vaccination proof, and she would submit a special form requesting the religious exception. It is unclear whether this would have worked at all, because USCIS only grants the religious exception if you refuse all vaccines, i.e. you cannot pick and choose, and in the call it sounded like she didn't want the tetanus one specifically.[3]It is also not explained why it was done this way; apparently one can just include this form in the original application.[4]According to the story, USCIS just approved the application without the RFE, the vaccination or the religious waiver. The adviser told the lady that this was the discretion of the immigration officer,