I-751 Approval Process

[lesly87 27]

Dear VJers,

I, like many of you, am anxiously waiting to hear back on my i-751 petition and was filling up the time with some reading and research. I thought I would share some of my recent findings with you in hopes to qualm the nerves of those of you who like me are still waiting on a decision. I welcome your comments and critiques.

Question: Explain why there is such a wide range of approval times for i-751 petitions.

Theory: The time to approval depends on the fraud level assigned to your case and the bottleneck at your local field office

Proof: Based on the USCIS Adjudicator’s Field Manual and data provided by VJers, I believe that most of the applications get sent to local offices for approval after being assigned a Fraud Level by the Service Center’s Adjudication Unit (see below chart for reference)

1.       This explains why there is a signature of your local service center director on all approval letters but VSC address. The computer system gets updated with the approval and the letter gets sent from VSC as the field offices don’t have staff to handle mailing of large quantities of letters.

 

2.       It also explains why when you call Tier 2 officer, if your file hasn’t been transferred over, they give you some generic or false information. Because your file is probably sitting still in a box stored in a building somewhere at VSC.

 

If your case has been transferred to local office, then they can possibly speed up the approval process or tell you that you will get a decision in the next 60 days. I don’t think your file will stay around the field office for longer without a decision being made.

 

3.       Depending on how “busy” the local office is, it may take a week or several weeks for the field officer to adjudicate your case.

4.       Petitioners from specific countries and/or with a divorce waiver usually take 1-2 weeks longer than the average.

5.       A lot of the cases with same field offices seem to have approval times within just few days off each other.