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| Juarez, Mexico |  Review on April 29, 2019: |
sunnysocal
Rating:  | Review Topic: General Review
Medical Appointment:
As mentioned by others on here, attempting to get vaccines ahead of time to save money proved futile. We made an effort to get a couple of the vaccines, evidence of which were stamped in his Cartilla de Salud from IMSS (Mexican health record booklet). This was completely ignored by the health clinic and my husband said that everyone was given the same set of shots no matter what kind of documentation they attempted to present. We weren't super surprised by this, but a disappointment nonetheless. The process was relatively quick and painless, although my husband suffers from a pretty strong fear of doctors and hospitals, so he was incredibly nervous and stressed. For your average person, it's thorough but not overly stressful. Our appointment was at 6 am at Servicios de la Frontera, and their service of being picked up was extremely helpful. My husband was out by 8:30, which was about as early as we would have expected. My husband said that some people took longer and were given "extra" screening, though he wasn't sure exactly why.
Fingerprints: Make sure you have the paperwork on hand! It's not a lot (I think just passport, appointment confirmation) but some people came without the confirmation and were turned away. Very fast, in and out, just be sure to arrive a bit earlier than the time.
Consulate interview: This is the hard one. Like everyone, we got up very early but even so, when we arrived there was already a good crowd out front. I ended up waiting for my husband outside for the 2.5/3 hours that he was inside. Visajourney was so helpful in preparing us, but one thing that I missed somehow was that you have to pay for the interview, something on the order of 250 dollars. I still don't know if that was something we were supposed to do online ahead of time or what, but when the interviewing officer realized he hadn't paid, he was directed to go upstairs and pay, which was fast. He was able to pay with his Mexican debit card.
Our challenge in the interview was going to establish intent to reestablish domicile and sponsorship. My husband had no history of illegal presence in the US or anything of the like, so that wasn't part of our concern. However, I was very worried about the reality of doing DCF and how to show that I was going to reestablish domicile with my husband. He was never prompted for proof that I was intending to reestablish domicile, so all of our paperwork with bank records, job applications, etc was not needed. Don't know if that's general practice, but when we talked with our AirBnb host who sees a lot of people come in to the consulate, and he also thought that my domicile was a non-issue. The sponsorship part was a problem though. Although I demonstrated assets that were well above the 3-year stated requirements (about 100,000), my US income was nada because I was still living in Mexico and living on a Mexican wage, so my petition to be my husband's sponsor was instantly rejected. However, the official allowed my husband to present paperwork for our backup sponsor, who lives in the US and earns a very comfortable income. This avoided being sent to administrative processing. We were so grateful that he gave us the time to present that paperwork in the moment, because another official could have said, "great, send it in and we'll review it in a month." We knew we were taking a risk by presenting my paperwork first, but we had to try.
Overall, we found relatively helpful people at the Mexican Consulate and things went as expected (according to what we knew from others' reviews -- thank you!!)
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Consulate / USCIS Member Review #26073