US Immigration from Chile

Hi Everyone,

My wife has her visa interview scheduled for early February at the embassy in Santiago, Chile, and after reading some reviews on here for the embassy, it seems like the passport return process can vary quite a bit. Some people said it took as little as 2-3 days, while others waited upwards of 2 or 4 weeks. After registering our appointment on the embassy's website, we learned about a "premium" option that would cost about $20 to have the passport sent to a different location, or a few extra dollars more to have to it sent to a location of your choosing, like a home address. It doesn't seem to indicate if either of these options actually arrives any faster, but I am wondering if the people who received their passports quicker might have opted for this service, and if it would be worth it just to spend the extra $20 if it means she could get the passport a lot quicker and we could book her flight 2-3 weeks sooner and be together after waiting all this time. Does anyone have any experience with choosing these "premium" options or have any insight on how they might impact the passport return process? If anyone has specific insight into the Chilean embassy in particular too that would be great. Thanks!

Hi Everyone,

On Tuesday of this week my wife and I received notice that we are now documentarily qualified for our visa interview, and the NVC will be working with the US embassy in her country of Chile to schedule the interview, which we are thrilled about and very relieved to be at this point. I did want to see if anyone else has run into this specific circumstance, however, as we also got a message which I am confused by through the CEAC portal at the same time as we received the DQ message. In submitting the civil documents after submitting her IV application, we had a document type listed on the page that asked for a police certificate from a country that my wife only visited for 5 months many years ago, in addition to the police certificate from her home country, which we submitted. After doing some research on this, I found that some people who also had this come up ultimately just submitted a letter stating something along the lines of "Since I was in this country for only 5 months, I am not required to provide a police certificate," and listing the months she was there, in place of an actual police certificate from that country, so we did that. But now, along with our DQ message, we also received a message that states, "This explanation has been accepted for NVC purposes. However, when you are able to obtain this document, you will need to upload this document under the Optional Documents section and present the original to the consular officer."

My understanding is that the police certificate would not be required at all, and they DQ'ed us anyway, so now I am not totally sure how to proceed. Does this mean that we will need to somehow still obtain a police certificate for the country she visited, or could this have been just an automated response and do they mean that we should just resubmit the same letter that we had written before, and have her bring that copy to the interview? I don't think she'd even be able to obtain a police certificate since she never formally lived in the country she was staying, but maybe she could get a letter or something else similar. I plan to reach out and try to speak to someone directly about this, but since we are already documentarily qualified, and they will schedule our interview anyway, should we be doing anything further through the CEAC, or should I just reach out to the US Embassy in Chile to see what they need at this point? I am a little worried that there could be any delays in scheduling our interview until anything more is uploaded, but in our other correspondence with the DQ it seemed like they are going forward with working with the embassy to get that scheduled, so I'm not sure if this is something I should be worried about or not for scheduling purposes, or for the interview once it is scheduled.

I know my post is already a little long, since I am a bit confused by our recent correspondence and not totally sure how to proceed, so any insights or thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

Hi All, I had a question regarding how to proceed with our application process while we are currently waiting on the I-130 approval. We should hopefully get the approval in the next couple months or so, but my wife may be needing to move back in with her family by the end of the year. Will this present a problem if she is no longer at the address we listed in the initial application? I am worried about potential correspondence that may get sent to her former address if she does end up moving, and how to proceed with documents in the future that may ask for her address and the potential discrepancy between the two. Do we let them know in advance or wait until the initial approval and notify about the change on future documentation only? Thanks for any information on this!

Hi Everyone, my wife and I married in September of 2024 and I submitted the I-130 application along with all of the evidence of a bona fide marriage in October of 2024, and so with how things seem to be progressing hopefully this means that around the end of 2025 or so we will have an answer on whether our application has been approved or denied. When we first submitted, I had only gotten to visit my wife in Chile once since our initial meeting back in January of 2023, and she had only visited here once as well, for our wedding. Since then, she has been here once more for an extended trip (about one month), and I have visited her for a second time as well. We have many more pictures, ticket stubs, and passport stamps from our travels together, including pictures we got with all of her family (we somehow forgot to take any pictures together when I met them for the first time during my first visit). I have also since gotten new insurance, and listed my wife down as my life insurance beneficiary, and also have several more receipts from various money transfers to help support her over the past year, along with some other receipts for various gifts and things from the past year.

My question is, am I allowed to, or is it in any way helpful to upload these newer documents to our chart where we submitted the application? I worry that this might somehow cause a problem since the official application has already been fully submitted, but I also have some worries about the potential for an RFE given that we had only been married a short time and hadn't had the opportunity for more of the "commingling of finances" and gathering even more contextual evidence for our relationship. Our initial evidence included all the evidence we had at the time, such as ticket stubs and receipts from flights, passport stamps, and pictures from our initial visits, a listing of her as a beneficiary for one of my financial accounts, along with two affidavits of support and anything else we felt would help our case. I recall reading someone post in this forum about how they uploaded some documents after submitting the application, but hadn't heard anything about that otherwise so just wanted some clarity on best practices, and what might or might not be helpful for our application's potential approval. Any insight into this would be great, thanks!

Not sure if this is the best place to post it, but what are people s thoughts on the likelihood that the median case time is trending towards 12 months?

They processed April in approximately 3 weeks before starting on May. All months since then have been roughly equal or less in application size.

If they continue at that rate, they ll start January 2025 the last week in December. Kinda hard to believe since we were at 17 months median when people in January filed; but the math is what it is.