|
|
| Rio de Janeiro, Brazil |  Review on August 8, 2014: |
Rebecca.V
Rating:  | Review Topic: K1 Visa
Beneficiary's review:
When I arrived at the consulate there was a huge line of people, but when we entered inside, the number of people that were in the K-1 visa section was rather small. I don't know why I got very tense to the point I started to cry in silent while putting the papers in order.
At some point they called me and a guy from the staff helped me to put the papers in the right order, after some more wait - the entire thing took almost four hours - I went to talk to a woman behind a glass, she checked all my papers and asked me a few questions just to kill some time while she was checking the papers and probably filling a form on the computer. Up to that point there was no problem.
Some time after I went to the interview itself. Everyone was interviewed in Portuguese by a woman, but I was interviewed by a man. I decided to speak in English since it appeared to me that he was an American that didn't know how to speak Portuguese very well. He didn't look at any of the documentation of our relationship even though I brought plenty of it, thanks to my lovely fiancée. Most of the people only had two or three questions, with me he made me take a oath that I wasn't lying and asked five questions, asking how I met my fiancée, who proposed, what was the relationship of her with the guy who presented her to me, what I planned to do in the U.S and he asked my age (?) and took a quick laugh - I am 20 - after that he said everything was alright except a paper where there were three boxes that were blank. He gave me a green paper saying for me to mail that to a certain address.
After that there was more than a month of waiting for the visa finally to come to my house, even me sending the damn paper the next day by priority mail (SEDEX), it was a painful wait, but I am sure it was worth it 
_____________________________________________________________________
Petitioner's review:
Unfortunately it seems either that the NVC did not forward our RFE to the consulate or the consulate didn't realize they had it, but the incomplete document had already been submitted to USCIS in response to a Request for Evidence.
I had missed the three check boxes of Part 3 of the I-129F.
Even though they should have had it, I emailed the completed paper to the consulate within hours of my fiance's interview. We also mailed it later that week.
Unfortunately, the consulate's incompetence was exposed early in communications. I found that they were unable to understand and respond to the content of my emails unless they were in Portuguese. For instance, they repeatedly said that the document required an original signature, when there is no place for a signature on the page requested. Eventually (after more than one week) they accepted the paper via email and told us to wait. I checked back a week later only to be told that they were in need of the same paper. One hand doesn't know what the other is doing.
Ultimately, we waited 5 - 6 weeks before getting my congressman's office involved. The day after his office contacted them, the visa status finally changed from "Administrative Processing" to "Ready". They acted as if they had been waiting for something from us (ha!) the whole time, and that they had already issued it before his office contacted them, but they hadn't. Our visa was further delayed by more than two weeks due to the worldwide database malfunction.
Finally, almost 2 months after his interview, I checked the status of our case and saw that the visa had been issued. No notice was sent via email to my fiance from Correios, and the tracking number they provided him yielded no results on their website. So we were very pleasantly surprised when his visa did arrive three days later
However, due to the gross incompetence of some of the employees at the consulate, our case was delayed needlessly for an extraordinary period of time during which we had no idea what was going on. It was an unrelentingly stressful situation. Due to the delay, my fiance was never able to meet my grandmother, who passed away about 6 weeks after his interview.
In other words, screw you guys!
| |
|
Consulate / USCIS Member Review #14966