Vashezzo

You can't drive before AoS? Is that a Kansas thing? Sounds insanely frustrating.

That one is simultaneously more understandable and more heartbreaking to me. Imagine waiting over a year just to be told that your case was ineligible from the beginning...

That makes sense. I honestly didn't realize that trying to pay via credit card was an option. Since you have to mail in the form I figured you had to pay with paper cheques as well.

Makes me wonder how 8-10% of filers manage to get rejected immediately, it seems like the only ways to do so are to not pay the correct fee or to not sign the form..

Honestly there's a decent number of these super fast cases, every month has 30-40 approvals before they get to actual work on it. Even 6 cases filed in April have already been approved. I've always assumed it's some mix of emergencies or people with connections, but it's such a small number of cases that I haven't worried about them.

That's pretty much what I said - I might have worded it poorly. I said 6-6.6 months until they finish November (at least excluding the worst outliers), which means about 4-4.5 months before they start it.

The bold numbers are roughly their current pace of processing, so for a November 2022 filer, if current trends continue, you're looking at about 6-6.6 months from today before they move on from your month. Basically you can roughly expect a decision anywhere between 4-7 months from today. (And in my opinion it's more likely to be on the shorter end of that range.)

The exact text from their email (as of March 3rd) was: That differs from the page for visitor visas, which simply states "You should schedule an appointment for your visa interview at the U.S. Embassy or Consulate in the country where you live." Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any good information about people in our situation. We're mentally preparing for a fight to get her transferred since we doubt she'll be able to get a Schengen with such tenuous ties to both Russia and Serbia. It's been very stressful to not have a clear path to an interview she can legally attend..

Thanks for the tip - we're planning to request a transfer basically the moment the NVC generates a case number. It's good to know where to send the request. I'm just concerned because their autoreply email says that they only accept transfers from "permanent residents of Serbia and Montenegro". It takes 5 years of temporary residency to become a permanent resident, so that's way out of scope for our timeline. I tried calling and emailing them earlier this year to clarify if Russians with temporary residency could interview there, but they never replied.

Do you have any further info on this? I'm expecting NOA2 in a few months and my partner has been living in Serbia for over a year. We're planning to send the NVC a copy of her residence permit and request a transfer to Belgrade. Is that not going to work?

I looked in to this for my partner as well, I found the CDC page outlining vaccine requirements. The TL;DR (at least for a woman in her 30's) is that they can use an antibody test to verify Hepatitis B, Varicella, and the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine. The only other required ones are a TDAP booster and flu shot (which I believe are typically administered as part of the exam). I'm not sure the current covid situation for people who are still in Russia, my partner is living in Serbia and will be required to get a non-Sputnik vaccine since they're easily available to her.

This is 100% correct. I'm not sure it's relevant to most people filing, but as someone with a Russian partner most of my mental energy and stress goes towards trying to figure out how to get a case transfer. The only way for her to attend an interview at the default embassy in Poland is to get a Schengen visa to some 4th party country (not easy) and abuse the lack of internal Schengen border checks to get inside Poland. If you get denied the Schengen visa, the only legal option is to beg various consulates to accept your case, which they are not at all obligated to do.

Something seems fishy with the NVC timelines. If you check their website, they say: "Current case creation time frame: As of 24-Apr-23, we are working on cases that were received from USCIS on 14-Apr-23. We are reviewing documents submitted to us on 10-Apr-23." Makes it sound to me like the bottleneck is still USCIS - they're just delivering the case files very slowly.

I can't speak for every embassy, but when I contacted Belgrade and asked about biometric passports I was told they were not a requirement as long as the passport was machine readable. The ones Russia is currently issuing should be fine for a K-1.

If I'm being cynical I would hypothesize that it's a sweet spot for them - they get to bring down the median more quickly by moving on further, and the 80% number isn't being drastically affected (still following the prior pattern of increasing 0.5 months every update). Of course, the current pattern is going to cause other issues down the line when more people start complaining about disparate outcomes that depend on if you were in the lucky half or unlucky half of your month.

The official number that USCIS publishes isn't actually useful for making predictions, it's just a statement of their past performance. What the 16.5 month number is saying is that they need to go back to October/November of 2021 to reach a month that is 80% processed. If you look forward, using average weekly cases closed since the start of February, they've been completing roughly 1000-1100 cases per week (compared to 500-600 cases per week in most of 2022). Your NOA1 was April 2022, so there's about 13,000 cases ahead of you. At current pace you can expect roughly 12-13 weeks until your NOA2. As a disclaimer there's a lot of uncertainty with that estimate (since USCIS has been prioritizing the first 50-70ish percent of cases they can complete, then letting the last ones linger in limbo for quite some time). This boosts the speed for the median case (which entirely coincidentally happens to be the metric that they were told to improve on), but does not improve the 80th percentile number that their website reports.

Would you be comfortable sharing what you wrote in your emails to the embassies? (With personal info removed of course.) My fiancee is living in Belgrade so we're really hoping to get her transferred there, and it might help to see what a successful transfer request looks like.

To give an update: I emailed the consular section of the embassy on 2/22, waited 7 business days (they say to wait 3 for a reply), received no reply. I called the phone number for the embassy, spoke to an operator, he initially told me that they'll only reply if the answer cannot be found in the automatic email they send out, but after I explained the details of the situation he said I should send another email, so I did. I once again got no reply, so I called again today, spoke to a different operator, and was told she couldn't help me as the consular section has no phone number, and she said I should just keep emailing them until they reply. Very frustrating..

It's only about $30 a month for the visa runs - there are vans you charter than drive you just across the border and ferry you back, takes a few hours and you're good for a month. Also, if you were to interview in Warsaw/Jerusalem/Almaty, do you have an estimate of It would almost certainly be more expensive to travel somewhere for the interview (and more of a headache too) - but if the temporary residence permit wouldn't be sufficient to interview, then we'd have to pay for the travel anyway, permit costs would be wasted. The sticking point for me is the embassy saying "permanent residents" as opposed to legal residents. It takes 5 years of temporary residence to apply for permanent here.

Do you know if a 1-2 year residence permit is sufficient? I can also email the embassy and ask them directly

My beneficiary is a Russian citizen but has been living in Serbia since May 2022. Thankfully(?) after moving to Serbia she changed apartments a few times, so the only Russian address she has on our I-129F is in the additional information section of the last page, everything else is in Serbia. We also requested to be sent to Belgrade on the I-129F, but from my reading that field has basically no impact on what actually happens. We obviously would prefer to be assigned to Belgrade than to Warsaw, and with the current pace of case processing we probably have about 6 months before NOA2. Our concern is that she's been living in Serbia unofficially using the rolling 30 day visa runs, and does not have a residency permit. The permits cost $2-3k, so we'd ideally only want to get one if it helps us interview in Belgrade. On the part of the Serbian government, they don't seem to care much about the visa runs, and their policies for applying for residency seem to me to encourage people to do repeat visa-runs (they're required to have found employment and signed a 6-month lease before applying for a temporary residency permit). On the US side however, the information I've found is a little bit contradictory/confusing. Some summary below: The state department website says "The NVC will give you a case number and send your petition to the U.S. Embassy or Consulate where your fiancé(e) lives." which makes it sound like they primarily base the assignment on your address history, not your citizenship, so we may get assigned in Belgrade based off the address history. The Belgrade embassy said via email that "Currently, we are only accepting immigrant visa applications from applicants who are residing permanently in Serbia or Montenegro." This seems to imply that even a temporary residence permit (allowing her to stay in Serbia for 1-2 years, before applying for permanent residency) would not be sufficient to interview in Belgrade, so it's pointless to get one. However, K-1 visas are classified as nonimmigrant visas, so maybe the restriction they list does not actually apply? BUT, the same email states "We are currently processing ALL immigrant visa categories, including K-1 Fiancé and Diversity visas." so maybe the restriction does apply to K-1's. If we can't manage Belgrade, the backup plans we have in mind are: Requesting a transfer somewhere else (Currently looks like Jerusalem or Almaty unless anyone has tips for other places to try) Applying for a Schengen visa to enter Norway (I think that's our best odds to be approved - I have friends and she has family there, she has a past Schengen visa for a trip to see her family there) and sneak into Poland after vacationing there. ??? Does anyone have any experience with this situation or a similar one? We'd appreciate any feedback or advice anyone has!