top_secret

If the birth certificate is late registered there should be a second page with an "Affidavit for Delayed Registration of Birth" which would list when it was registered. You will definitely need an original PSA copy of your Birth Certificate at your interview. No exceptions on that. If you do not have the one you submitted to NVC then get a new one, upload it to CEAC and bring that to your interview. You need to bring ALL of the original documents you submitted to NVC to your interview. DQ just means that NVC thinks you have all the correct documents. It's the Embassy that approves or rejects the originals.

There were some SLC timelines on Reddit from couple of months ago showing about a 1 month wait for an oath ceremony. I haven't noticed any reports of same day oath at that particular office.

I wonder if this would impact US Embassy Manila's apparent severe constraints on Immigrant visa interviews for spousal visas. Earlier this year they had been interviewing over a thousand EB-3/EW applicants a month, while at the same time interviewing only like two hundred CR1/IR1 applicants a month with a year long backlog. If they would shift that extra thousand a month interview capacity towards spousal interviews for a few months maybe they could maybe clear out a bit of their huge backlog.

That's what ours says too. It is also the same on the approved and closed I-751 case so I assumed that is just "normal". I am intrigued by those who seem to have some kind of date associated with it rather than just "true". Are these dates that don't correlate with anything outwardly visible?

Whether or not you need additional evidence in the case of a late registered birth certificate is up to the individual consul at the interview. It may also depend on just how late it was registered. Two years late registered and a friendly consul may not require any extra evidence at all. 10 years late registered and/or a strict consul might issue a 221g for more evidence if you don't bring any with you. A Baptismal Certificate is one type of additional evidence you might submit in the case of a late registered birth certificate but it is never a requirement. For many Filipinos they could easily get a new copy of their Baptismal Certificate from the local parish where they were baptized. If you can't get that, there are other types of evidence that you could use too such as school records, old ID’s, etc. My wife was 5 years late registered. She got her baptismal certificate by actually messaging the Facebook page of the local parish in the province where she grew up. They found it in their records and let her sister pick up a new copy for her. Then her sister went by her old high school and they still had her form 137. (I noticed that she failed English😆) Her elementary school issued a letter on DepEd letterhead stating that her Form 137-E was destroyed by a typhoon but certifying that she had attended that school as a child.

The whole issue does not apply much to a foreign spouse. It is the Filipino Citizen that is required by the Philippine Government to report an overseas marriage. What the foreign spouse does is not much concern to the Philippine government and they have no jurisdiction over a foreign spouse outside the Philippines. My own opinion is this. If the neither of you have plans for maintaining significant ties to the Philippines then it probably makes little difference. If you feel that your marriage is likely to end in divorce then it is very beneficial to the Filipino Citizen spouse NOT to file it. If either of you ever think of retiring there, having a bank account there, drivers licence, business, property, etc etc etc, it will be an issue that could constantly come up at every dealing with the Philippine Government and it is probably easier just to file it. Plus, juggling multiple names on multiple travel documents is doable but kind of a hassle.

BPI ATM's will let you do 20k if you hit "other amount" and then key it in manually. I never got shut down so far doing two 20k withdrawals back to back. I haven't tried pushing it past that. HSBC ATM's might give you 40k but there's not so many of them. Schwab also gives you some amount of free wire transfers if you are talking big bucks but someone needs a local bank account to receive.

She doesn't even need a Philippine Passport at all for the I-751. A scan of the new passport would be a good identity document with the name change. I don't think there is any specific requirement to update USCIS if the foreign passport changes.

Log into your USCIS account. While logged in paste the following URL into the address bar and change "IOE_YOUR_CASE_NUMBER" to your actual IOE case number. https://my.uscis.gov/account/case-service/api/cases/IOE_YOUR_CASE_NUMBER Chrome has a "Pretty print" checkbox that formats the output a little easier to look at. All it shows on ours is that it updated when we uploaded some additional evidence a couple of weeks ago. No great fantastic revelations but it is a little interesting.

A free checking account at Schwab Bank remains about the best way to get pocket money while traveling in the Philippines or just about any other country. Not only do they not charge any conversion fees at all, they even rebate the P250 fee the ATM's charge.

When you receive your visa it will almost certainly be annotated “IV Docs in CCD” which means x-rays and everything else that used to be in the hand carried packet has already been been transmitted electronically to the Consular Consolidated Database. So there is nothing to carry other than the visa.

I just got back from there and noted crews out hanging up parols in the medians of the roads like two weeks ago.

Thank you very much for coming back to follow-up. I'm happy it worked out for your wife. We are still waiting to see when my wife will naturalize but it seems likely before our holiday trip and EVA Air is the airline. When they issued the boarding passes, was it in the US Passport name or the Cambodian Passport name? I'm curious what they put in the APIS data.

US CBP is only concerned with scheduled controlled medications, namely opiates, sleeping pills, tranquilizers, medications that may be banned in the US or obvious commercial quantities. Unless it's Vicodin or Chinese rino horn vitality pills etc, they could literally care less about anyone's ordinary health related medications and would ordinarily give maximum benefit of the doubt to anything even remotely reasonable. They are not looking to take away anyone's medicine.

Well here's a one week update for San Diego specifically. Nothing much has changed but I have located an additional seven San Diego cases self reported online so it adds some breadth to the sample size. So now, based on 33 San diego N400 cases who have been scheduled for interviews so far in 2024, the statistics are as follows. Time from filing to interview in San Diego in 2024. Average time: 144 days Median time: 131 days Fastest time: 72 days Slowest time: 245 days # of cases in less than 4 months: 15 # of cases 4 to 6 months: 13 # of cases over 6 months: 5 more specifically # of cases in less than 3 months: 3 # of cases 3 to 4 months: 12 # of cases 4 to 5 months: 6 # of cases 5 to 6 months: 7 # of cases 6 to 7 months: 2 # of cases 7 to 8 months: 3

It seems a big batch of NVC scheduling did go out yesterday. Covering DQ dates up until somewhere in November 2023. CR/IR-1/2 and IR5's. This is in addition to last week's mass expedite. That is at least a little progress on the backlog.

You have resurrected a 3 year old thread from during the rona-lockdown era. Virtually none of what was written about CFO for tourists during that period applies today. CFO is no longer applicable for Filipinos traveling on tourists visas. They should DEFINITELY be well prepared for a secondary interview by BI if it is a first international trip.

K1 appointments are self scheduled on the ustraveldocs site. In recent months the embassy has failed to release enough appointments to accommodate all of the "ready' applicants. Hence the tedious constantly checking to see if any appointments opened up. Ordinarily CR/IR applicants are scheduled by NVC. Expedited CR/IR cases and cases where interviews were canceled for sputum testing etc are able to self schedule on the ustraveldocs site. However for almost a year NVC scheduled ZERO CR/IR applicants. NONE. This year has only seen some sporadic NVC scheduling. At irregular intervals they did the so-called "mass expedites" where they issued expedites to many cases in batches which allowed them to self schedule. Throughout that time the embassy has released plenty of open CR/IR interview appointments on ustraveldocs. Just most CR/IR applicants who are waiting almost a year could not book them unless they had an expedite. K1=many applicants who are able to book and no open appointments. IR1=few applicants who are able to book and many open appointments.

There really is no pattern at all. It is completely random. The embassy makes it up as they go along.

Was this a Japanese divorce??? If that is the case(???) they will require a Japanese divorce document. They describe what you would need and how you would get it here. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/Visa-Reciprocity-and-Civil-Documents-by-Country/Japan.html If the divorce was in a country other than Japan then look up the requirements for that country.

A SPA does have to be completed in person at a Philippine consulate. No way around that. It can be done at the lessor "honorary consulates". There is one in Portland if that is any closer to you. I have not personally ever heard of SPA's needing apostilled and I am not sure you could get it apostilled in the US so I would double check where that requirement came from. The document is already certified by the consulate so I dont understand who would apostille it.

US Embassy Seoul is a marvel of efficiency. US Embassy Manila is an epic clown show. Understand the difference based on where your beneficiary must interview.

File the I-90 online. It's faster and you can't hand over the physical card online anyways. So hold on to the mistake one until they ask for it back so you still have a physical card in your possession.

The real bottom line is that no one can predict what will happen before your case concludes. As recently as the beginning of 2023, CR/IR1's were flying high at US Embassy Manila with minimal wait times for interviews. While at the same time K1's were stuck languishing in USCIS hell for extended periods before ever even getting sent to the US Embassy Manila. What a huge reversal of fortune this last year and a half made. NO ONE can predict what the next year and a half will bring except that for better or worse it is unlikely to remain status quo. US Embassy Manila has been an epic clown show recently, practically a parody of incompetent government work, but they are slowly whittling away at the huge CR/IR1 backlog that did not exist before and that they only created in the last year. It seems plausible that things are hopefully heading back to normal-ish(???). CR1 is the better choice for any number of reasons and since you cannot predict the future you cannot not necessarily say it will eventually be "slower". There is a reason that the Philippines remains poor despite all that it's population has going for it. It is hard to do business there and a lot of stuff simply doesn't work right. It is hard to get important stuff done. If you struggle against it you will just drive yourself crazy. The Philippines is really awesome but you have to learn accept what you cannot change.

Those are times from the filing date until the day of the actual interview. It does not account for when interview letters were sent out or whether is was same day oath or additional time waiting for an oath ceremony date.