Our Ciudad Juarez experience

[orlandom 0]

Hello my name is Orlando and I am posting in hope of helping others with their journey in Ciudad Juarez. Our journey started in December of 2012 when my wife and I got married. In January of 2013 we consulted an attorney and started our visa journey. I can't really answer too many questions on filling out applications or forms since our attorney took care of that. I can tell you that we started out with an I601, then proceeded with the I130, and last was the DS-260 which is the Immigrant Visa and Alien Registration. Also the type of Visa we applied for is the CR-1.

I believe our DS-260 was submitted in April or May of 2014 and we did not get an interview date until the first week of December. One of our questions we always had was: How much time were we going to have from the date we got the notice till the actual interview date? It was about a month's time because as I said we got the notice on the first week of December 2014 and my wife just had her interview this past Friday the 16th of January.

Once we knew our interview date our questions started stacking up as to how we were going to approach our visit to Ciudad Juarez. One of our first questions we had was where to put the DHL delivery for the visa, Ciudad Juarez or my wife's hometown of San Luis. After much going back and forth we decided to go ahead and wait for it in Ciudad Juarez( that is the part where we are at right now). Our lawyer stated to us that once a site for the DHL had been chosen it could not be changed. As I am finding out now, that is not true. The DHL site can be changed up to a day or it may be the morning of the interview. As i said before, our attorney took care of filling out all the paperwork and setting all the appointments. The appointment for the fingerprints at the ASC(Application Service Center) in ciudad juarez is done at this website: http://mexico.usvisa-info.com. If your attorney schedules this appointment for you make sure that you ask him/her for the username and password he/she used to set up appointment. This way you will have access to it because you are going to need it if you want to change your DHL site and also that is where you will obtain your waybill number in order to track your visa with the DHL carrier.

Tired and sleepy so I will continue tommorrow.

[Ryan H 3,819]

Moved from IR-1/CR-1 Process & Procedures to Mexico, Latin & South America regional forum; topic is specific to Mexico.

[orlandom 0]

Good Morning

One of our next questions we had is how are we going to Ciudad Juarez and where are we going to stay at. We are from the Houston area so we contemplated flying to El Paso instead of driving but in the end we decided to save money and drive since we could not book a round trip because we were unsure of our return date. Since we drove we also had a question as to whether park in El Paso and taxi over or drive straight to our hotel in Ciudad Juarez. A couple of factors made me park in El Paso and taxi over: 1. I have never driven in Mexico 2. I do not know the area 3. I read that even though your car insurance might cover you in Ciudad Juarez, you still need to purchase Mexican car insurance. I have tried to notice if many people drive their American cars over and I have noticed a few but I would guess a large percentage do taxi to the hotel. It also depends on each person’s circumstances whether they can even drive to Ciudad Juarez.

My next question I had was what taxi service to use to taxi over to our hotel in Ciudad Juarez. I did some research and called a few in El Paso and they all quoted me around $75 US dollars. I ended up using a service called Juarez El Paso Shuttle. The owner, Ricardo Cordero, picked us up in the El Paso airport area and drove us over to our hotel for $65. He was very nice and made us feel super comfortable. I would recommend him to others. His number is 915-740-4400.

I have to go, I will continue later.