Willie_Overall

Contacted my congressman today. I also self-filed a Mandamus at the federal court near me and started the process of having the defendants served. I'm concerned that I didn't do it right so I'm also in the process of contacting lawyers. I'm considering filing a second mandamus through them. Very frustrating that I have to spend thousands of dollars on this while illegals get the red carpet treatment at the border.

Yeah, I don't have much hope for the Congressman. Politicians in the US don't seem to work on behalf of their constituents anymore. My plan is to self-file a mandamus. If that doesn't work (because I'm still considered within normal processing time), I'll hire a lawyer and have them do a second one once I'm out of normal processing time. I don't really know what to do in your situation. Do you know the average processing times for RFE? Maybe you could ask Hacking about it on one of his live shows.

There are many 7/29 approvals in the Facebook group and Immigration Timeline here. I've also seen 7/30 and 7/31 approvals.

I just don't think this is accurate. If it was, then why would they have approved just about everybody from my dates (and the surrounding dates) over the last few days? Our case is simple. There's no reason for a delay. I think it's just sitting on someone's desk somewhere and they're taking their sweet time. Something along those lines. I plan on going to my congressman's office on Monday and I've also started writing up a mandamus. I'll keep everyone here informed on what happens.

My name is an extremely white-sounding name and there is no one else by my name currently alive that exists in the world. I've never committed any crime and have never been married before. There is no reason why my case would take more time than anyone else's.

Looks like we got skipped over. I knew this would happen. I hate how our government treats its citizens. I'm sure we wouldn't be treated so poorly if we were trying to do this illegally.

PD July 28. Hoping this week is our week!

Eh. I'm an independent too and strongly dislike both parties. However, while Trump might be a bit better for legal immigration (though, like another poster said, this is questionable), he's a hell of a lot worse on many other non-immigrant related issues. Add to that that he's clearly having similar age-related issues as Biden. The truth is that we simply have horrific options in the US.

Not to rain on your parade, but even the USCIS portion will take quite a bit longer than 10 months. Right now, for July 2023 filers, the wait is about 14 months. May 2023 filers waited about 12 months. January 2023 filers waited about 11 months. So you can see the trend here and the speed at which that trend is progressing. You'll be lucky to be approved at just the USCIS level in 2025 at this rate. The Philippines embassy is also a disaster. Wait times for an interview are about a year and this has also been getting worse. I'd say you're looking at 2027 (at the earliest) before your wife can legally immigrate to the US. In terms of the tourist visa, your statements are conflicting. So I can't tell if your wife has one already. If she doesn't, it's unlikely that she'll be approved for one with a pending spousal visa. If she does have one, just have her come visit, stay for a few months, then go back home. Rinse and repeat until her spousal visa is approved. Not much else you can do.

Is that site still working? I used to follow TrackMyVisaNow, but it hasn't worked in weeks.

That's where my estimates are now as a July 2023 filer. However, things have been getting significantly worse. In May of 2023, the estimates were around a year. Now we're looking at 13.5 to 14 months at least. It seems to get worse every month. 15 months is on the horizon.

Yeah, I saw someone in the Facebook group get approved today too. PD was July 2 or 3. We're late July PD and I got a notification today from VJ that we're in the range of approval for the first time. Very hopeful that this will end soon!

Either way, I just can't believe that they could get away with something like this. Don't they have to follow the guidelines?

Does that really matter though? In January, they processed 400 or so. Wouldn't that have included dependents too? So the increase would be the same in that case. Also, 300-400 principal applicants is still 2-3x as much as spousal visas, even though spousal visas are supposed to be prioritized.

Well, just looking at some of the other backed up embassies (Islamabad and Ciudad Juarez), it very clearly isn't the case. Way more spousal visas are being processed than F1, F2, F3, F4, etc. This seems to be a Manila-exclusive problem.

Good points. Another member of that group responded with this: "Unfortunately, the data does seem to reflect what he's saying. There were almost 1000 F category visas processed in November 2023 and only 130 spousal visas (so about a ratio of 10:1). If you compare this to January 2023, there were about 400 F category visas processed and about 80 spousal visas (still disgustingly low, but a ratio of 5:1)." At least that one is based on data but yeah who knows.

What do you all think about this from the Facebook group? "What I have heard is that there will be no more mass transfers. NVC will schedule interview dates based on openings embassy gives nvc monthly. Interviews will be scheduled in date order by DQ date and it does not matter what type of immigrant visa (IR-1, IR-2, CR-1, CR-2, IR-5, F2A F2B) Ect...... There are many IR-5 (parents), F2A and F2B (spouses and children of green card holders), F3 married children over 21 and F4 siblings that were not included in last 2 the mass transfers. Therefore, they have the oldest DQ dates. Therefore, they are getting the interview slots in order now. They are at January 2023 now. Looks like a lot more wait until they get to the IR-1 and CR-1 DQ in June 2023. A year wait could be the normal now. Letters I am seeing from people writing senators and embassy response of currently working on January 2023 immigrant visas. Also, I have my own visa consulting business. I have clients that are IR-5 Parents, F2A spouses of green card holders and F4 siblings. They all have way older DQ dates. I am physically seeing these clients getting actual interview dates assigned by NVC and IL by the embassy lately." Others baced it up with stats and experiences.

Not sure who you know, but there are plenty of Facebook groups and threads on this forum that say otherwise.

The current wait time is unknown. They seem to have stopped sending out interview letters last June. I have not seen any credible evidence here, on Reddit, or on Facebook that they're sending out any interview letters. There's an entire Facebook group dedicated to this. People have messaged their political leaders and filed multiple expedite requests with absolutely no success. For reference, our DQ date was August 2023. Still waiting. It seems like Manila just randomly decided to stop doing its job one day. It's unclear when this will be resolved.

Mine said that it didn't have enough similar cases to make a prediction (and ours is pretty run-of-the-mill). That tells you everything you need to know about that predictor.

Philippines. I have no idea why they aren't interviewing, it's a big issue for a lot of people. They don't seem to have sent out interview letters since June (and that seemed to have happened due to pressure from a congressman). That congressman was told that there was a glitch where NVC doesn't send Manila documents and Manila doesn't request them. This supposed glitch was supposed to be fixed by this year, but here we are. Whenever people email the embassy, they respond with a canned response, stating they are up to date and there is no backlog. It's not clear what's going on since they ran mostly normally until early 2023.

Hope you're right. One of the members of the Facebook group claims to have met with a congressman and that he was responsible for the June 2023 expedite. He said that the reason for the issues is some glitch in the system that they expect to be fixed in 2024. Who knows how accurate that is (between the guy, the congressman, and the embassy), but that's what he said. If that's the case, then we might not expect another auto-expedite possibly ever and this was won't be resolved until that "glitch" is fixed (if it exists).

Okay thanks.

I could think of a few scenarios where we could make that happen, yes. Is switching embassies an easy process? How would we go about doing that? Thanks for the advice!

Okay thanks.