EhsanHatem

Hey all,

My husband and I are currently residing in Egypt. We just started our papers for my husband to move back with me to the US. Since we're both living in Egypt we wrote our Egyptian address on our I-130 form which we sent on the 1st of September. On the 7th of September we recieved an email confirming the acceptance of our case as stated below:

'Your case has been accepted and routed to the USCIS California Service Center for processing. Within 7-10 days by standard mail you will receive your official Receipt Notice (Form I-797) with your Receipt Number.'

We waited about 20 days for the form/papers but nothing came. Yesterday we called USCIS to inquire about the status and to see whether or not the form was sent to us. We used our recipt number to access our case information that was sent to us in the email. We were told by the rep. that the reason we never recieved the form was because my (petitioner) address is outside the US (forign)and that we need to change it to an address within the US. He asked us to send a letter (by mail) to the Service Center handling our case but with further research we found a rep who helped us make the address change by phone.

We have a few questions:

1- Is it true that they do not send anything outside the US? If so, then what are the US citizens residing abroad supposed to do?!?

2- Is the form I-797 important for getting to the next step? One rep said that we just have to sit back and wait, and that if we need to send anything we can print a copy of the email we recieved and attach it as proof instead of the I-797 form. Is this true?

3- How long are we supposed to wait to see a change in our case status -whether it's been approved or denied? And is there anything we can/should be doing now?

4-Has this happened to anyone else? Should we be worried or is this normal?

Thanks for your time, any info or help will be greatly appreciated. We REALLY wanna get out of this country

Sincerely,

Sunny & Maz

Dear All,

My husband and I sent our I-130 pack from Cairo, Egypt on the first of September and received an email notification informing us of our case's acceptance conformation (It's now being handled by the California Service Center. It said in 7-10 days by standard mail, we should receive our official Receipt Notice (Form I-797) with our Receipt Number. It has been 15 days now since we received the email and we still have not received anything. Should we be worried? What can we do to check on the progress?

Any information on this would help greatly.

Thanks in advance,

Sunny and Maz