UPDATE FROM WARSAW POLAND US EMBASSY INTERVIEW COMPLETED, VISA ISSUANCE DELAYED
So we are now in Warsaw Poland, we completed the US Embassy interview last Tuesday, that was 1 week ago as I type this update. The total interview time took about 2.25 hours. Most of the time was just waiting for her number to be called once inside. The interview was scheduled for 8am, we arrived at the embassy at 7:45am there were already about 30-40 people standing in line. There was a line coordinator working the line and we were separated into two lines one for the non-immigrant visa folks, and one for immigrant visa folks. I was not needed/allowed to go inside with my wife during the interview. She was inside by 8:15. I had to wait 2+ hours on the street outside. Nowhere to sit, no coffee shop, no cafe near by.
While inside she was given a number. When called she presented her documents to an immigration officer, a woman that spoke good Russian, she reviewed the documents and said 'its all in order' gave her documents back and asked her to sit down again and wait for her number. About an hour or more later she was called to the 2nd official, a man with not so good Russian. He spent less than a minute reviewing her documents and asked her two questions:
1. How did you meet your husband
2. How long have you known your husband
Though she had every document requested in the instructions to be sure to bring with you, he asked her to return to the hotel and upload her updated birth certificate and police report and he indicated they would then process her visa quickly and she could pick it up at the mailboxes ETC. We went back to the hotel, scanned and uploaded the two documents within 1.5 hours. The need to do this was understandable since her original police certificate expired because of the long delay between moving her case from Moscow to Poland and the delay in obtaining an interview. The need for the birth certificate update was because my wife decided she wanted a brand new birth certificate that was in perfect condition, her original was partially not perfectly readable in the area for her birth city....so she got a new one and the officer noticed they were different so its understandable to upload the new one.
LESSON LEARNED: If any of your documents expire or change, its a SUPER GOOD IDEA to upload them before your interview so that they are already in the system before your interview.
Why the official couldn't just copy and upload them or put them in a folder I don't know but its not part of their process apparently. The official assured her that if she did this quickly (the upload) they would quickly process her visa and it would be available for pickup in a few days at the mailboxes etc.
THIS DID NOT HAPPEN....
We have extended our stay an additional week in Warsaw, and this has been expensive to change flights, get a hotel for an additional week, food, etc.
It's near impossible to get anyone on the phone that can tell you anything more than to just wait. We check the CEAC web site profile several times a day for an update, nothing after a week now. No email communications from the embassy, no communications at all.
The Warsaw embassy has several ways to communicate with them. This includes live online chat, Skype and web phone call.
The live online chat turned out to just be a robot and I was unable to actually get my chat routed to a human. I wasted about 30 minutes repeating my wife's name, passport number, birthdate and email address to the robot only to at the end be told it was a holiday. It's Tuesday morning and not a holiday in US or Poland
I got no response to the Skype message I sent even after adding the correct Skype account to my contacts, no response at all
The web talk phone call just took me to the same voice response system that calling the number on the website provided
Called the number on the site +48 22 307 1361 (see below)
Finally got a human on the phone this morning, talked for 20-30 minutes, he answered questions and was quite patient but could not indicate how long we might have to wait...that is how much longer we will have to wait. No indication whatsoever how much longer.
The problem is that obviously we need to get back to work, we do not have unlimited funds to stay in Warsaw for an indeterminate time. To compound the issue, the embassy has my wife's passport and she obviously can not leave Warsaw/board a plane without it.
We can get her passport back by doing a request for it to be returned, this can take 2-3 days, and if we do that we (apparently) do not have to return for an interview, BUT she will have to submit her passport again using the correct form and the support agent told me several times that the passport can ONLY be mailed from the mailboxes ETC location in Warsaw! It can not be mailed from any other location! Are you sure I asked him several times!
MY level of frustration is just off the scale, apparently you can't just walk down to the embassy and explain your situation to anyone, there is no way to expedite your request or processing, you can only get your passport back and start all over or sit and wait an unknown amount of time.
If this is what happens when you have a simple immigration case where the parties have known each other for 7+ years, been married for 5+ years and appear with all original documents as requested, I can't imagine what a hard case must be like.
At this point we are wondering if we can stay an additional week....and the only advice we have to offer is to be sure if any of your documents changed to upload the updated version to the CEAC site well before the interview. If they do not need to be updated, DON'T...they were already approved. There is no need to update documents that are not expired (like a police report) and that have already been accepted and approved.
Any sage advice would surely be appreciated.
@blakezero When it became clear to us that we were not going to get her visa on that trip, we contacted the Embassy help line via the online message system and requested that her passport be returned because we had already been there 3 weeks, we were running low on $$ and I was tired of extending flights and hotel accommodations. We spent easily an additional $3-5,000 while waiting. We got an actual phone call the next day from someone at the embassy that works in the immigration area and she was trying to help us, trying to get our package processed but because I could not produce my federal income tax TRANSCRIPT for the current year we could not meet the "we want that IRS transcript document also" request. Knowing that we could not produce the last minute document requested, she told us to just go by the embassy anytime, show the guard at the door her 'green sheet' and they will let her in and she could pickup her passport. And we did, and we left the Warsaw embassy and Poland the next day empty handed. I am still totally PO'd about this entire last minute while we are already here IRS transcript request and I had no way to solve the problem while I was there. The IRS has no expedite my request for a transcript option and it was not available to me online because I had filled my most current return just days before the trip. All that being said, I know exactly what you are going through and if you send them a note or if there is a number at the Israel US embassy to actually call, you can request them to return the passport and if they operate like Warsaw, she can just go pick it up right away. It is also possible that telling them you can not wait any longer and must go home MIGHT get your petition to the top of the stack and it will mysteriously get processed and hopefully approved. You are basically powerless against the embassy personnel, if they want "it", your petition will be held till they get "it".
