DevinB

To be honest, I pestered them every other day at that point in the process. After we submitted it took 2 days for them to reply with the new date, about 2 weeks out from the reply. Then my wife went to the appointment, dropped off her passport and we waited and a week and a half later we got our approval. I emailed every other day when we were wating for the last bit. After all that, got my wife on her flight 2 weeks later and shes been home since April. Hope this helps, if not, feel free to ask clarifying questions.

I would go for any angle you have available to you. If you are going through financial hardship and her coming home would alleviate that, use that. Get all the evidence you can for whatever reasons you use to justify your expedite request. If you have health conditions and need help with them, get them documented and show that her returning would make them better. I assume you are the US citizen in this circumstance. The important part of this whole process is proving that her being away is causing you hardship and that her return makes that better. For the stress, I would suggest going to a dr you trust, a therapist, a psych. Basically showcase that you have multiple medical professionals confirming that your wife's absence is causing you issues that her returning can resolve. Look for things big and small that are being affected. As someone else said, there isnt a harm in trying either way but it would be best for you to take a deep look at how her being away is affecting you, medically, financially, and in basically every way. You can also get additional evidence that can help supplement your case but wouldn't prove it by themselves. Letters by members of your community, family and friends about how deeply this is affecting you. If youre religious, get your equivalent of a pastor to write in support. Lastly, im really sorry you are both going through this. My wife was in yangon during the earthquake and she called me in the middle of the night to say goodbye because she thought her apartment was going to collapse on top of her. I understand the worry. For my wife, it took a little over 2 years from start to finish to get here. When we got the expedite, it took from the end of October to the beginning of March to finish up. And if you're worried about the travel ban and everything going on, spouses of us citizens were exempt last time. If somehow they aren't, you can apply for a waiver to try to get her in despite the ban.

Yeah of course. First thing I did was look up the expedite process. There are things like financial hardship, humanitarian reasons and so on. When you find the reason that best fits your situation, that's when you start the process. A very important aspect is that you must show how the situation is affecting the US citizen. If the person immigrating is in danger or having issues, its much more difficult to get approved sadly. You can still do it, its just harder. So write the expedite request from the point of view that it will help the US citizen petitioner if you can. First you gotta get evidence, being thorough as possible pays off here. For example, when I wrote my expedite request it was on the basis of humanitarian need, financial need and medical need. I wrote about how my wife's absence made it difficult for me to make money by showing how I had to spend extra for childcare and how It made further education impossible until she returned. The evidence I used was bank account statements, receipts for services for my children and the schedule of the services they received to showcase the magnitude of cost and prove that there was significant cost to my wife being away. My humanitarian section focused on Myanmar and my wife specifically. I talked about how much danger she was in everyday she remained. I used her ethnic minority id as evidence of danger, sent pictures showing bombings that had happened at her apartment complex, news articles and the US travel advisory pdf as evidence here. For the medical need, I focused on how my disabled kids were being affected by her absence. I used their medical diagnoses, service calendar, schedule, and letters from all of their providers affirming that their mother returning would make accessing care easier for them and that they would benefit from her return. I looked up successful expedite petitions and used their letters as templates for it. I would have sentences like "My wife's absence represents hardship for my family, we cant access necessary services very easily (exhibit a, b)." I then put the evidence in a table of contents on the final page and made sure that they were marked correctly, if I called it exhibit a, id mark it as " exhibit a (receipts of service)." When I was finished writing it I contacted my representative to ask for help. Their office thankfully agreed to help after I explained the situation. I then sent them a copy of my expedite request and had them help me submit it alongside anything they could send to help me as well. I saved the evidence as combined pdfs since you cant upload more than 5 files on the immigration website. I then called the representatives office every few days to ask if they'd heard anything. My thought was that I had to be persistently annoying to get anyone to help me so I just bugged them all the time. You can also submit it yourself by using the inquiry form on the USCIS site but getting all the extra help I could was important for me. My expedite was approved after about a month of waiting. It sped the process up considerably despite me screwing up at the last hurdle when my lawyer didnt inform us that we were missing an important document to submit before our interview could take place (it ended up taking 3 weeks to get it and i uploaded it but didnt click submit at the bottom of the immigration site, waited 2 weeks with them telling me they didnt have it until i checked and realized i didnt click submit). I hope this helps. If it didnt, feel free to ask specifics and ill do my best to point you towards the right direction.

Recently there was a large and disastrous earthquake in Myanmar and the government has declared a state of emergency. The embassy in Rangoon has announced they will stop all non emergency operations, including visa processing with no indication of when they may return to processing. My wife dropped off her passport to them on 3/21/25, we received verbal approval at the interview and were told it should take around 7 days to process and the earthquake occurred on 3/28/25, around 5 business days after we had turned the passport in. I assume that despite our case being approved for an expedite on the grounds of urgent medical need that we will still not be processed during this time. With the current uncertainty surrounding potential future bans on immigration from Myanmar, I am incredibly worried about this delaying our processing well past any potential future ban being announced. Is there anything I can do to help my wife's IR1 here? I have contacted my representative to reach out to the consulate and embassy itself, having also done so myself. Welcoming any advice or support.

I'm really hoping we can get that waiver then, her being denied would be undue hardship on me and my son's, it was the basis of our expedite request. Since our expedite was approved I pray that means we can get this if the worst comes to pass. Thank you for your reply, I really really appreciate it. And I agree, it seems so ridiculous.

I don't know if there is a way for her to travel early. If we can get the passport into them Monday and they get it back to us we will book the next avaliable flight. Thank you for answering me. I pray we get in. It's been 2 years of nightmares

My wife had her interview at the start of this month. They told her she needed one more document to be submitted and then when she had your bring her passport to the embassy to finish up. We were told that after that we would be approved. My wife is from Myanmar and we are being processed through the embassy in yangon for an IR1. We even had our representative reach out and got an email from the state department that they're going to "have this finished quickly for you". With the breaking news of the incoming travel ban and a more complete list of banned countries, what can we expect to happen? It's rumored to be going into affect on the 19th of March and I am incredibly distraught that we might be right at the finish line only to be denied because of the new ban. Myanmar is supposedly going to be included in the orange category. We already had our expedite approved for medical reasons. Does any of this help us? Or will we be stopped at the gate so to speak? I know waivers were avaliable last time but only 2% of them were approved. We already got approved for the i130 as well if that makes any difference. I'm hoping and praying somehow we get everything in right under the wire but if we don't I want to be prepared to do whatever I can. Thank you for reading.

No her country of citizenship is not Thailand, we already have submitted the police certificate from her country of citizenship, myanmar

My wife was just at her interview and they told her she was missing a police certificate from Thailand. Now my wife left Thailand at 15 and we were under the impression you didn't need a police certificate if you weren't over 16. My wife did live there for 10 years, from 5 to 15 so could that be why? We hadn't received any notice that it was missing from our documents online before this interview. Is this a mistake on their part or on ours? If it is on ours we will get the certificate but if it isn't, how can we get this resolved quickly?

My wife is currently waiting for her interview to be scheduled on an IR1. I got it expedited in early January for medical and humanitarian reasons, and hoping to get in before any extra hurdles were thrown in the way. It was accepted and we got an email telling us to finish an additional questionnaire and get our medical exam done. We got that done and we submitted our request for an interview on the 5th, finsihed the questionnaire and got it in on the 12th just for their records, it didnt ask us to upload it, only have it for the interview. Got an email back saying we have been "registered in the waiting list". I've seen other people say they got their interview scheduled days after but it's been 2 weeks and we haven't heard anything. Getting concerned about it, worried that I might be doing something wrong that's slowing it down. I understand it's a different timeline for everyone, I just worry like everyone else. Embassy is Rangoon in Burma(myanmar) and we have emailed trying to check in on it and gotten no reply. We also haven't been able to get a single call to connect to contact them about it either, seemingly their phones are disconnected. I'm worried that a ban will come down that will affect Burma again like it did in 2020 and we will be denied. We've been waiting for 2 years now and me and our kids are hoping for an end to the nightmare soon. Anyone who has been through something similar? Any hope to give or words of encouragement? I'm sure we are all feeling similar worries and stressing the uncertainty.

Oh ok that makes sense. It's in oregon and there are usually some amtraks running but it is always much slower than really most other options. I just wanted to find some way to calm my wife's nerves

So with the air crashes that have happened recently my wife is scared to fly to the US (we are in the final steps of our IR1). Is it possible for her to fly into Canada then simply cross the northern border and take a train or something similar down to our state without it causing issues? I'm not very knowledgeable about Canada but Google seems to confirm you can enter Canada with a US green card and a foreign passport. That said, there are most likely other issues with said plan so I was wondering if anyone else had done this for whatever reason?

In that case it would be $78,783.38 so I think we are ok but I won't stop worrying until I see her walk down the stars at the airport.

I calculated it and the end result was 72,723.19. I got this by multiplying the two most recent pay periods of 995.20 and 2,034.93 by 24 each as both have 2 pay periods a month. With this it looks like we should be perfectly fine, I'll send an email with the latest pay period for both to my wife print out and bring to the interview

My wife has just received her notice to schedule her interview at the embassy. Currently I don't have taxable income so we have a joint sponsor to help us get my wife home after us being separated for two years. On December 22nd we received a notice that our income wasn't enough and we need to add an additional joint sponsor. My current joint sponsor has an additional job they began working in June of last year and should pretty easily pass the guidelines. The current Guideline for Sponsorship is $45,725 for a household of 5, on of those 5 being my wife. Their Tax returns for 2024 show them having $49,358 which doesn't include a whole year of the additional income (as it started in June and therefore only represents half a year). Now that seemingly clears the guidelines unless I misunderstand something but I still worry. The additional half year of income would add at least another 20k to the income bringing us up to around 70k which again seems sufficient. The notice we received worried me so I spoke to our attorney and was told that sometimes second job income can be accidently ignored and that since the tax return we submitted was 23, that the second job wasn't on there making it look like we don't have enough but that the proof of employment and paystubs we sent in should be enough to prove we have enough. I recently sent the attorney the aforementioned 2024 returns, W2s and paystubs just in case. The attorney told me not to worry and that If I can, find an additional joint sponsor so I can feel confident but that he doesn't believe its necessary. I still worry immensely that this will all end up in a mess or a rejection or any other catastrophic outcome im sure we all have feared for ourselves. I wanted to know if anyone else has been through something similar and could give me some insight? I already sent the income documents via email for my wife to print up and show in the interview as evidence just in case. One final thing, our case was recently approved for expedite and so I am trying to make sure it all works as quick as possible to get my wife home and get things back to normal.

Thank you, that clears up my confusion. It'd really just freaking me out and it makes things difficult on me and the kids but I don't think it'd be enough for an expedite. I appreciate you explaining

I apologize if this seems stupid but what do you mean? Are you saying that the situation itself warrants an expedite request? If I misunderstood then my bad. If that is what you mean then I would say that I don't know what would count as good evidence other than articles in local news outlets but maybe I just don't know what to look for very well

That's probably the best thing for me then. Thank you for the kind words

We are currently trying to relocate her to Thailand as well. I worked with a senator to try to expedite when she had a medical issue but the issue got resolved and the senator's rep said that getting an expedite without a Dr recommendation for travel would be more difficult and that they were sure it wouldnt be approved. I also don't think just sending in news articles would be enough evidence but maybe I am being too cynical. Thank you for the taking the time to reply to my post, I appreciate it and the advice.

My wife is in myanmar right now. I'm Scared for her safety all the time. There are bombings across the country, violence in general. If you have a family member in a similar situation how do you keep it together? From what I've seen on here it seems my wife could be hit by a bombing and still not receive an approval for an expedite plus I don't even know what evidence they'd accept either. How do you cope with the constant worry? The fear? Is it really all just grit your teeth and keep going? Is there anything you do that actually helps? I filed back in August and it seems like every month I do a little worse at keeping myself calm.