A permanent resident of many years sat across from us with a prosecutor’s discovery packet in an unrelated matter. Two pages in, there was a citation from nearly two decades earlier for a minor offense of the kind immigration law calls a crime involving moral turpitude. He had paid it and forgotten it. No one took his fingerprints. It had never appeared on any immigration form, because the relative who helped with the paperwork never knew. The government had run his background when he adjusted status and found nothing. A county attorney found it in about a minute.
Nothing was hidden, and nobody lied. The record the government checked in his green card years and the record a prosecutor can see today are different records. This page explains the three systems that hold a person’s criminal history, why each one gives a different answer to “what do they know about me?”, and how to pull your own record from each source before you file an immigration application or sign a plea agreement. It is the third of our records guides, alongside getting your immigration court file and the FBI letter that now tells applicants their fingerprints are on continuous watch.
Why did USCIS find nothing years ago, but a prosecutor found it in a minute?
Because they searched different databases. When USCIS takes your fingerprints, the FBI compares them against fingerprints submitted by arresting agencies. A case that never produced a fingerprint card, which is what happens with most citations and many misdemeanors handled by mail or by paying a fine, cannot be matched that way. The prosecutor searched a different system, the FBI’s National Data Exchange, called N-DEx, which holds incident reports, citations and tickets, and other records that police agencies upload, and which did not exist until 2012 and has been filling in since, long after many older cases were closed. The data was not there when USCIS looked. It is there now.
Put plainly, there are three records, and most people know of only one:
- The fingerprint-based record. The FBI’s Identity History Summary, commonly called a rap sheet. It contains arrests that produced a fingerprint submission. This is what USCIS runs whenever it takes your fingerprints, which is most applications.
- The name-based record. Each state’s criminal history repository, searched by name and date of birth. In Montana that is the Department of Justice’s CHOPRS search. State law limits what the public, including you, can see in it.
- The everything record. N-DEx, the FBI’s law-enforcement-only warehouse of incident, citation, booking, and supervision records contributed by thousands of agencies. You cannot search it. A prosecutor can, and so can ICE and CBP.
The gap between the three is where the surprise lives. The rest of this page takes each one in turn, then gives the four steps for pulling your own record and what to do with what you find.
What is the FBI “rap sheet,” and what is not on it?
The FBI’s Identity History Summary is a list of arrests built from fingerprint submissions, and it only knows about arrests that produced one. The FBI’s own description, on its Identity History Summary page, is that the summary lists “certain information taken from fingerprint submissions kept by the FBI and related to arrests.” For each arrest it shows the agency that submitted the prints, the arrest date, the charge, and the disposition if the agency reported one.
Three things are therefore routinely missing. A citation you paid without a booking is missing, because no one printed you. A charge whose outcome the court never reported back is shown as an arrest with no disposition, which is its own problem, as our article on the FBI privacy letter explains in its section on fixing arrests that show no final outcome. And an arrest in a jurisdiction that submits prints slowly or not at all may be missing for years.
This is the record USCIS reads. For a naturalization application, the USCIS Policy Manual describes two FBI checks: the fingerprints collected at your biometrics appointment, and a separate FBI “name check,” which the Policy Manual describes as a search of the FBI’s Universal Index of “personnel, administrative, applicant, and criminal files compiled for law enforcement purposes”: the FBI’s own file index, not the fingerprint-based arrest record (see 12 USCIS-PM B.2, as updated October 2, 2026). As of October 2026 the fingerprint check is no longer a one-time snapshot, and according to law-firm reports of internal guidance USCIS has since April 2026 been receiving a fuller criminal history return than before; both developments are explained in our article on continuous vetting. Neither change puts a never-fingerprinted citation onto a fingerprint-based record. That case lives somewhere else.
What does a Montana name-based background check show, and what does it hide?
A Montana public criminal history search shows arrests and court outcomes on felony and misdemeanor charges that were reported to the state, and by law it hides any case that was deferred and later dismissed. The Montana Department of Justice runs the search, called CHOPRS, the Criminal History Online Public Record Search. As of October 5, 2026, its background-check page lists the fee at $20 per name search online ($15 by mail), requires the person’s complete name and date of birth, and allows up to four aliases at no extra charge. The same page says what the public may receive: “arrest and prosecutor/court information on felony charges and misdemeanor charges, but information is limited by Montana’s privacy laws. Criminal records that have been deferred and later dismissed cannot be released to the public.”
Read that last sentence twice, because it describes the most common “clean” result that is not clean. In Montana, a deferred imposition of sentence usually begins with a guilty plea. When the deferral period ends without a violation, the court strikes the plea and dismisses the charge under Mont. Code Ann. § 46-18-204: automatically for a felony, but for a misdemeanor only on a motion that you, your lawyer, or the court has to make, so a deferred misdemeanor nobody moved to dismiss is still sitting in the public record. Once the charge is dismissed, the statute makes everything about the case “confidential criminal justice information” that the public can see only by court order. The Department of Justice’s sealing page spells out who still can see it: the information becomes “accessible only by law enforcement agencies, including the military and Border Patrol.”
So the state’s own public search will tell you that a deferred-and-dismissed case does not exist, while the agency deciding your immigration case can see the guilty plea that started it. And for immigration purposes that plea was a conviction the day it was entered, as the next section explains. A Montana name search is still worth running; it is the cheapest way to find a case you forgot or a matter filed under a name variant. Just do not read a blank result as proof that there is nothing to disclose.
Two practical notes. First, name searches err in both directions: a misspelled name, a transposed birth date, or an unlisted alias can hide a real record, and a common name can return someone else’s. Second, Montana also offers a fingerprint-based state-only check by mail for $10 (fee as of October 5, 2026, same page). It is more reliable than a name search for Montana arrests that were printed, but it does not reach other states or federal records. If you have lived in another state, that state’s repository is a separate search with its own rules; we can tell you where to look.
What is N-DEx, and why can’t I search it myself?
N-DEx is the FBI’s national warehouse of police records, and it is open only to criminal justice agencies. The FBI’s law-enforcement page for N-DEx describes it as a national repository that “contains incident, arrest, and booking reports; pretrial investigations; supervised released reports; calls for service; photos; and field contact/identification records,” and explains that it exists to hold what the FBI’s fingerprint and warrant systems do not: incident and case reports, full case files, and corrections data. The FBI’s own bulletin article from February 2022 adds “citations and tickets” and “warrants” to the list, reports that the system became operational in 2012, and says that more than 8,000 agencies were contributing records and the database was approaching one billion searchable records (FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Feb. 8, 2022; figures as of that date).
That is the system that explains the pattern we see. A person adjusts status in the 2000s and the fingerprint check comes back clean. A decade or more later, local agencies have uploaded their old citation and incident files into N-DEx, and a prosecutor in an unrelated matter runs the name and sees everything. The county attorney in the case described at the top of this page did exactly that. Nothing had been concealed; the data arrived later.
Two consequences follow. Members of the public cannot query N-DEx, so you cannot pull this record the way you can pull the other two; the closest you can get is the certified court file in step three below, which is where those citations and dismissals actually came from. And immigration enforcement is on the law-enforcement side of the wall: ICE and CBP are criminal justice agencies, and since April 2026 USCIS is reported to receive a fuller FBI criminal-history return than before (see our continuous-vetting article). A record that a Montana public search is forbidden to show you can be read by the agencies deciding whether you are admissible, removable, or of good moral character.
Can I really have a conviction I don’t know about?
Yes, and the usual way it happens is that something you paid or completed counts as a conviction under federal immigration law even though no one ever used that word. Immigration law has its own definition, in INA § 101(a)(48)(A). A “conviction” means a formal judgment of guilt, or, where adjudication of guilt has been withheld, where a judge or jury “has found the alien guilty or the alien has entered a plea of guilty or nolo contendere or has admitted sufficient facts to warrant a finding of guilt,” and “the judge has ordered some form of punishment, penalty, or restraint on the alien’s liberty to be imposed” (8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(48)(A)). Our page on criminal convictions and immigration status walks through what that definition catches and what it does not; the short version is that it catches more than people expect.
Four patterns produce the conviction nobody knew about:
- The paid citation. A misdemeanor citation is often resolved by signing a plea form and paying a fine at the clerk’s window, sometimes without ever standing in front of a judge. In the court files we have pulled, that payment was almost always entered as a guilty plea, and a plea plus a fine satisfies both halves of the federal definition. The person remembers paying a ticket; the record shows a conviction. Whether that particular offense matters to your immigration case depends on what it was; a shoplifting-type citation is the classic example of one that does, because theft offenses are generally crimes involving moral turpitude.
- The deferred case that “went away.” A deferred imposition of sentence that was later dismissed under § 46-18-204 is still a conviction for immigration purposes, because the guilty plea and the conditions imposed were enough when they happened. The Board of Immigration Appeals settled this in Matter of Roldan-Santoyo, 22 I&N Dec. 512 (BIA 1999): once a person is convicted under the federal definition, a later state action that expunges or dismisses the case through a rehabilitative procedure does not undo it. The Ninth Circuit, which covers Montana, keeps one narrow exception for certain first-offense simple drug possession convictions entered before July 14, 2011 and later expunged under a state rehabilitative law; it does not help a theft or assault citation.
- The case someone else handled. A parent paid the ticket when you were nineteen. A relative filled out the green card forms years later and did not know. The forms were signed under penalty of perjury with an answer that was wrong, and no one meant it to be. See our article on what happens when the government says the green card was never valid for how that is handled.
- The out-of-state matter. Each state keeps its own repository. A Montana search does not see a Wyoming citation, and the fingerprint-based FBI record sees it only if Wyoming printed you.
One more thing the forms do that people miss: they ask about arrests and citations, not only convictions, and they ask even when the record was sealed or expunged. The disclosure duty and the conviction definition are two different questions. A sealed Montana case may not be a conviction at all, if there was no plea, and you still have to disclose the arrest. The FBI-letter article’s section on disclosing everything the forms ask about covers that side.
How do I pull my own record before the government does?
Pull all three records you can reach, in this order, and bring the results to a lawyer before anything is filed. The whole set costs under $50 and a few weeks.
1. Order your FBI Identity History Summary. The FBI charges $18 per person (fee as of October 5, 2026, per the FBI’s Identity History Summary page). The fastest route is an online request at edo.cjis.gov followed by electronic fingerprints at a participating post office, which the FBI says it answers within about 48 hours of the post office visit; the post office may charge its own fee. You can instead mail a completed FD-1164 fingerprint card with the signed applicant form and payment; the FBI lists up to 15 days for mail requests (processing times as posted October 5, 2026). If there is nothing on file, the FBI sends a letter saying you have no prior arrest data on file. Keep that letter. It is proof of a clean fingerprint record on a given date, and it is worth having in the file. One caution: the private “FBI-approved channelers” that advertise faster service may, under the FBI’s rules, process requests only for U.S. citizens and permanent residents who are in the United States, so anyone in another status uses the FBI directly.
2. Run the Montana name search, and one for every other state you have lived in. CHOPRS is at the Montana Department of Justice’s background-check page; $20, complete name and date of birth, four aliases free. Search every name you have used, including a maiden name and any spelling variants that have appeared on your documents. Then read the result with the limit in mind: it will not show a deferred-and-dismissed case. For another state, that state’s repository has its own search and its own rules; we can point you to it.
3. Get certified court dispositions from every court involved. The repository summaries are not the filing currency. USCIS and immigration judges want the court’s own certified record of what happened: the charging document, the plea or judgment, the sentence, and the dismissal if there was one. In Montana, citations and most misdemeanors live in the justice, city, or municipal court of the county or city where the citation was written; felonies and deferred felony cases live with the clerk of district court. Ask the clerk for a certified copy of the complete file, or at least the judgment and any order of dismissal. Clerks charge a small per-page copy fee plus a certification fee set by statute (Mont. Code Ann. § 25-1-201 for district courts). If the court tells you the file was destroyed, ask for that in writing on the court’s letterhead, stating the reason and whether similar records for that time and place still exist: USCIS’s own regulation requires exactly that statement when a record does not exist (8 CFR § 103.2(b)(2)(ii)), and it is what allows other evidence of the outcome to be accepted in the record’s place. This step is the only way to reach what N-DEx holds, because the court file is where those entries came from.
4. Read the results against the immigration definitions, not the criminal ones. For each entry, ask three questions in order: Is it a conviction under § 101(a)(48)(A)? If so, what kind of offense is it for immigration purposes, a crime involving moral turpitude, a drug offense, a domestic violence offense, or something harmless? And does an exception apply, such as the petty offense exception for a single moral-turpitude offense whose maximum penalty was a year or less and whose actual sentence was six months or less? And remember that for inadmissibility an admission of the facts of an offense can count even without a conviction, as the Board reaffirmed in Matter of Mendez Maldonado, 30 I&N Dec. 62 (BIA Sept. 22, 2026). Our criminal convictions page explains each category. This is the step to do with a lawyer, because the answer decides which of the paths below you are on.
If you have ever been in immigration court, add the court’s own file to the pile; our guide to getting your immigration court records explains the four ways to request it, and it also explains how to request your A-file from USCIS, which holds every answer you have ever given the government about your history.
I found something. What happens next?
It depends on where you are in the immigration process, and each situation has its own page on this site.
You are about to file for citizenship. Stop and read our post on why naturalization is an audit of everything that came before it. An N-400 re-opens the whole file, and an old conviction that was never disclosed is most often found for the first time at that interview. Depending on what the record shows, the right move may be to file with full disclosure and a legal argument, to wait, or not to file at all.
You already have a green card and the record was not disclosed when you got it. The government can treat a green card as never lawfully obtained if a ground of inadmissibility existed on the day you became a resident and was not caught, and no time limit protects you from that charge in removal proceedings. What can be done about it depends on how you got the card and what was wrong with the file. A misstatement on the forms can sometimes be forgiven by a fraud waiver that is available only before an immigration judge and, under the Board’s February 2026 decision in Matter of Forjoe, only to a person admitted on an immigrant visa rather than one who adjusted status here. That waiver does not forgive the old offense itself; for that, the § 212(h) waiver described next is the tool. Our page on the green card that was “never valid” explains it.
You are applying for a green card or a visa and the record shows a crime involving moral turpitude. First test whether the petty offense exception applies; if it does not, a waiver under INA § 212(h) may. Our guide to the § 212(h) criminal waiver explains the three ways to qualify and starts, as this page does, with the instruction to get the certified record before anyone touches a form.
The FBI record shows an arrest with no outcome. Get the disposition from the court and send it to the FBI with a correction request. The continuous-vetting article explains how to fix an arrest that shows no final outcome.
You have a criminal case pending right now. That is the next section, and it is the one where timing matters most.
I have a criminal case pending now. Should I pull my record before the plea?
Yes, before the first offer, because the prosecutor will. In our experience, discovery in a criminal case routinely includes the defendant’s criminal history, and the prosecutor’s search can reach N-DEx. If the first time your defense lawyer learns of a decades-old citation is in the state’s discovery packet, the plea negotiation starts from behind.
The count matters, not just the content. The petty offense exception to inadmissibility is available only to a person with a single crime involving moral turpitude; a second one, however old and however small, removes it, and two moral-turpitude convictions after admission that do not arise from a single scheme are a ground of deportability regardless of the sentences (INA § 237(a)(2)(A)(ii)). So the same plea can be safe for a person with no prior record and disastrous for a person with one forgotten citation. Nobody can negotiate the right plea without knowing which person the client is, and the only way to know is to pull the records in steps one through three before the plea is on the table.
Montana offers a tool that, used carefully, avoids a conviction altogether: a pretrial diversion agreement under Mont. Code Ann. § 46-16-130, which involves no plea and ends in dismissal with prejudice when its terms are met. The caution is in the statute’s own text: the agreement “may include stipulations concerning the admissibility of evidence, specified testimony, or dispositions if the deferral of the prosecution is terminated and there is a trial on the charge.” A stipulation that amounts to admitting the facts of the offense is an admission when it is signed, whatever its stated purpose, and if a judge then orders or approves the conditions of the agreement, both halves of the federal conviction definition can be met; the Board found exactly that for a Texas pretrial-intervention agreement in Matter of Mohamed, 27 I&N Dec. 92 (BIA 2017). So the words of the agreement, and who signs the order, matter as much as the label. Our criminal convictions page explains the Padilla duty and why to talk to an immigration attorney before you plead; this page adds only the sequencing point. Records first, offer second.
What should I do first?
Order the FBI summary and run the Montana search this week, before you decide anything else; they are cheap, they take weeks rather than months, and most of the time they come back clean and you will have proof of that on paper. Then get the certified court file for anything that shows up, and for anything you remember that did not show up, because the entry that is missing from your own search is the one most likely to be sitting in N-DEx. Bring all of it to a lawyer before an N-400, an adjustment application, a trip abroad, or a plea. Learning what the government will see, and seeing it first, is the single cheapest thing a non-citizen can do about an old record.
If you have found something in your record, or you are not sure what a result means, contact Immigration Law of Montana to arrange a consultation, and bring every page you have pulled.
