Andrew+MM

FrnUSCISInquiries@state.gov is the email address we used for the initial question as to whether we qualified. This was in October 2022 and an answer came back in 2 days.

@Black Unicorn I am so happy you got it sorted. It sounds like the military service of your spouse triggered some extra specialized vetting. The bureaucracy at the Embassy probably won't even allow for questions to be answered by the usual personnel as this vetting goes beyond the most common procedure. Hence the slow response time. I'm glad you kept it together and got through the process. Your post should help others in similar situations.

There are some similarities to our situation and we decided to declare assets and have a joint sponsor. I am the Beneficiary, and work for a company that is 100% remote working so I could prove my income would continue. My wife (USC Petitioner) has been a Hausfrau these last 6 years and has not submitted a tax return because she has had no income. What we did was file the latest 1040 and include a copy. Use my income and our combined assets, which put us over the top. However, I had read that approval of I-864s depending on Beneficiary income and assets is down to the discretion of the Consular Officer, so we included a joint sponsor too. We wanted to have backups to the backups. For me, use everything you can to get you over the 125% benchmark so that there can be no question it should be approved.

24 hours after I requested to interview, I received an email with a different link which allowed me to schedule the interview. The email was one line, and could easily be filtered by a spam bot. If it's taking longer for you (10 days seems like longer than normal), it might be worth emailing the Consulate to see if there is an issue. They just changed the process a little and maybe the I-130 approval from 6 years ago is causing them some problems.

For me this was all done through the online portal. Link sent via the email inviting us to request the interview. No physical letter. P.S. Your dates for DCF say 2016?