US Immigration from Chile

NVC just sent us an email telling us to submit our documents online, which said we should have already received a welcome notice with case number and invoice.

I was able to make out the case number from the subject of the email, but both of us have searched all of our email folders and spam folder and can t find anything with an invoice number on it. Reached out to NVC, but also wanted to check if anyone had seen this before.

Hi Everyone,

My wife and I are preparing for her upcoming interview on February 4th, and she just received an email from the US embassy in Santiago that requested a document we have never heard was necessary before, and now we're a little worried this could impact our approval. Here is the email in full:

"Dear Applicant,

Please be advised that for your upcoming immigrant visa appointment, all forms and supporting documents that were submitted electronically to the National Visa Center (NVC) must be presented in original or certified copy on the day of your interview.

All of these documents must be properly scanned into your CEAC account, and on the day of your interview, they will be reviewed by the consular officer as part of the visa evaluation process.

Valid Passport plus passport-size photographs.
Beneficiary's Birth Certificate (original or certified copy).
Petitioner's Birth Certificate (original or certified copy).
Beneficiary's Police Certificate.
Marriage and Divorce Certificates for both the Beneficiary and Petitioner (original or certified copy). (Only for spouse/fianc visa categories).
Affidavit of Support I-864 (One for each sponsor).
IRS Tax Return Transcript or Form 1040 with W2s for the most recent years, corresponding to the date the Affidavit of Support was signed, for the petitioner, co-sponsor, and any spouse or household member with whom they file taxes.

The absence of any required original or certified document will necessitate rescheduling your appointment and will cause a delay in the processing of your immigrant visa.

We recommend that you carefully review your documentation and ensure that you bring all required originals or certified copies to your appointment.

*If your case is not electronic, please disregard the step of uploading documents to your account and only bring the documents required by the NVC."

We have never seen anything prior to this that said the petitioner's birth certificate is required. I can easily provide a copy of my birth certificate and send that over digitally, but providing the original or certified copy is more complicated, and I'm not sure we'd be able to get that over to her in the mail by the time of her interview at this point. Has anybody else needed this or does anyone have insight into how this might affect our interview? Getting something like this so far into the process and so close to the final interview is causing us to worry a little bit, and we want to make sure we do everything we can to get that final approval. Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated!

Hi Everyone,

My wife has her visa interview scheduled for early February at the embassy in Santiago, Chile, and after reading some reviews on here for the embassy, it seems like the passport return process can vary quite a bit. Some people said it took as little as 2-3 days, while others waited upwards of 2 or 4 weeks. After registering our appointment on the embassy's website, we learned about a "premium" option that would cost about $20 to have the passport sent to a different location, or a few extra dollars more to have to it sent to a location of your choosing, like a home address. It doesn't seem to indicate if either of these options actually arrives any faster, but I am wondering if the people who received their passports quicker might have opted for this service, and if it would be worth it just to spend the extra $20 if it means she could get the passport a lot quicker and we could book her flight 2-3 weeks sooner and be together after waiting all this time. Does anyone have any experience with choosing these "premium" options or have any insight on how they might impact the passport return process? If anyone has specific insight into the Chilean embassy in particular too that would be great. Thanks!

Hi Everyone,

On Tuesday of this week my wife and I received notice that we are now documentarily qualified for our visa interview, and the NVC will be working with the US embassy in her country of Chile to schedule the interview, which we are thrilled about and very relieved to be at this point. I did want to see if anyone else has run into this specific circumstance, however, as we also got a message which I am confused by through the CEAC portal at the same time as we received the DQ message. In submitting the civil documents after submitting her IV application, we had a document type listed on the page that asked for a police certificate from a country that my wife only visited for 5 months many years ago, in addition to the police certificate from her home country, which we submitted. After doing some research on this, I found that some people who also had this come up ultimately just submitted a letter stating something along the lines of "Since I was in this country for only 5 months, I am not required to provide a police certificate," and listing the months she was there, in place of an actual police certificate from that country, so we did that. But now, along with our DQ message, we also received a message that states, "This explanation has been accepted for NVC purposes. However, when you are able to obtain this document, you will need to upload this document under the Optional Documents section and present the original to the consular officer."

My understanding is that the police certificate would not be required at all, and they DQ'ed us anyway, so now I am not totally sure how to proceed. Does this mean that we will need to somehow still obtain a police certificate for the country she visited, or could this have been just an automated response and do they mean that we should just resubmit the same letter that we had written before, and have her bring that copy to the interview? I don't think she'd even be able to obtain a police certificate since she never formally lived in the country she was staying, but maybe she could get a letter or something else similar. I plan to reach out and try to speak to someone directly about this, but since we are already documentarily qualified, and they will schedule our interview anyway, should we be doing anything further through the CEAC, or should I just reach out to the US Embassy in Chile to see what they need at this point? I am a little worried that there could be any delays in scheduling our interview until anything more is uploaded, but in our other correspondence with the DQ it seemed like they are going forward with working with the embassy to get that scheduled, so I'm not sure if this is something I should be worried about or not for scheduling purposes, or for the interview once it is scheduled.

I know my post is already a little long, since I am a bit confused by our recent correspondence and not totally sure how to proceed, so any insights or thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

Hi All, I had a question regarding how to proceed with our application process while we are currently waiting on the I-130 approval. We should hopefully get the approval in the next couple months or so, but my wife may be needing to move back in with her family by the end of the year. Will this present a problem if she is no longer at the address we listed in the initial application? I am worried about potential correspondence that may get sent to her former address if she does end up moving, and how to proceed with documents in the future that may ask for her address and the potential discrepancy between the two. Do we let them know in advance or wait until the initial approval and notify about the change on future documentation only? Thanks for any information on this!