MacUK

Not unbelievable though. When I go to gigs here in Glasgow I often meet up with a couple who regularly travel to the U.S. for concerts. Even literally flying all the way over there to just spend a few hours in the States to see the show then getting the next flight back home. When the events you want to see can only be seen by travelling long distances then that's what you do. After England managed to scrape their way to the rugby world cup a few months ago a friend of mine was seriously costing out the options for flying to Japan for only a couple of days just to watch it on a big screen outside the stadium and then fly back the next day. Other than not seeing my kids for years, one of my huge regrets over screwing up my VWP is that I'll probably never tick off those "bucket list" concerts with artists who never tour outside the U.S.

You being a U.S. citizen has nothing to do with it, it's not you that is applying. You have to look at it from another point of view. All of her immediate family are in the U.S., you said yourself that the reason she isn't there also is because she was over 18 at the time. I don't know why you mention asylum seekers, people use tourist visas all the time to "visit" family and forget to return home. I don't know the statistics but I imagine there are far more cases of tourists abusing their visas than there are asylum cases. No one is saying that's what you're doing but that's the way the consular officers look at it. They don't know your stepdaughter and have to guess her intentions based on what is in front of them. That all sounds quite negative but you shouldn't let that stop you trying. People get approved all the time but it's always best to remember that it's not guaranteed and there's very little you can do to help other than give her advice to think more about what her reasons are for returning to Honduras and less about her reasons to want to be in the U.S. They don't care why people want to visit, they only care that they'll go home again afterwards.

The verdict would likely still be the same, you can thank the thousands of people (from all over the world, not just Vietnam) who told the COs all about their plans to return home and then forgot about them 10 seconds after leaving the airport. It's good that you had a realistic expectation and I'm sorry your wife had high hopes only to be disappointed. I went in to my last B2 interview thinking I had a remote possibility of an approval and my 214(b) was a kick in the teeth. Next time I'll go in expecting the worst.