AlissaCarly

One abusive post has been removed. Please be civil or you will be removed from the thread.
Dieseltu, the first year I was here was just awful. I'm sure I was just as miserable as your wife but my husband understood that my frustration was due to missing everything and everyone I knew, so he helped me to familiarize myself with my surroundings and even went out of his way to find places where I could pick up items which weren't readily available to me here, but were everywhere in my home country.
I don't think I fully adjusted until the end of my second year, but the first year was the worst. Give her time. Give her hugs. Give her flowers. She doesn't want you to fix it for her; she's just grieving.

Wow, I am really glad that I missed most of this conversation. I don't think that insulting and dismissing the concerns of others is particularly mature or constructive behavior from our "veterans". If you're not interested in the opinions of others, then don't read them. There's no need to be obnoxious about it. Maybe you could go knock an ice cream cone out of a child's hands instead. You know who you are.
The "it's always been this way and you shouldn't expect anything better" attitude leads directly to this apathetic and inefficient system. I don't think it's radical to suggest that the USCIS could distribute based on case load and process ALL applications in the order received, regardless of the form-type or residence of the applicants. That just seems fair - we all get in line and wait together.
I don't expect that we will get the 100k needed for the White House to review the petition. That's not really the point. The point is to give those of us who are not resigned and apathetic a tool to demonstrate a level of interest/concern to our representatives.
I know that my partner and I have a long way to go and that none of this will (probably) help us. I know that couples from CA who aren't even engaged yet will get processed before we do. I'm doing this to try and make things fairer in the future.
Thanks to the 57 who have signed on to the petition so far. And thanks to everyone who will sign in the future.
If you have constructive or positive ideas, please pm me. I'm leaving this thread to the resigned and bitter.

I emailed the Senator to complain about the discrepancy b/w TSC and CSC a few days ago. I just received a letter in the mail from him today. It says USCIS (but I think he implied TSC) is processing applications file on Dec 27 2013 (well, it reads 2014 in the letter but I think it's a typo).

Signed Thank you for doing this!

Everyone has covered this really well, but I'd just like to add that my husband and I filed for the K1 in December 2012. We tentatively planned at that point to have our wedding on American soil in October 2013. My husband JUST finally entered America this past April 2014. People gave us the same warnings, but I too thought I had estimated the time well according to the statistics and gave a few extra months. It's 5-7 months (but varies considerably and upredictably) for the NoA2, but you have to realistically give yourself at least one more month for the NVC stage and then another month or two, minimum, for the embassy stage. Even that is cutting it short. It was over a year from NoA1 before we even had the INTERVIEW, and we had unexpected delays at every stage, including after the interview and after getting the visa in the passport! Granted, our country is quite a bitmore difficult to get through than Ireland, I am sure, but you should still be prepared for each stage going quite a bit longer than expected. I just urge you caution because soooo many of us go through the same situation as you and wish for the best, but then things don't turn out that way! We had our wedding venue booked and we are lucky that they allowed us to transfer the date to 2014. We just had our civil ceremony in the US and are now looking forward to having our wedding this coming October.
And speaking of non-official non-legal celebrations, we had a non legal celebration in Egypt before my husband arrived to America and we had our legal ceremony. But I think that is different than you flying here to have a non-legal ceremony in America. We carefully read the rules for marriage in Egypt on our embassy website and didn't break (or bend) anything in what we did... but in America, pretty much any ceremony is considered a real marriage by the USCIS. I wouldn't attempt it. The risk is too high.
Good luck! I hope your processing goes much faster than all that after all.
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You are misinformed if you think the average time for a K-1 is 5 months. That is the average time for the FIRST STEP ONLY.
This comes up every so often, and no, it is not cause for expedite and it is bad planning.
Sorry. Best of luck to you.

In all honesty, this is not grounds for an expedite. Think of it this way: Every person on this board (and we are only a tiny cross section of the people trying to go be with our loved ones) has reasons that they want to go faster through the process.

The fact that you planned your wedding without getting the visa ready on time means that you want to jump to the front of the line for reasons of poor personal planning.

The wedding isn't until November. That's lots of time to talk to vendors and pick a new date. Pick up the phone and don't call USCIS, talk to your vendors and venue about moving the wedding, now, rather than later, when you are less likely to incur penalties. Look at current trends for how long it's going to take, then tack at least four months onto that for delays. Remember: You have six months in which to activate your visa, then 90 days in which to marry. That's essentially 9 months after visa issuance in which to get married. So delay the wedding and announce the delay now, not later, and don't try to jump the line.

I know you are all excited to get your noa 2. But this is a call to anyone who recently received one.
I have noticed some people not upgrading their timelines correctly. Remember when you receive an NOA2, fill the date your received it. Do not skip this step and move on to the NVC part.
If you do this, your timeline thinks you are in the NOA2 phase still. So please update it correctly to reflect the process you are going through.
Due to all the wrongly updated timelines, the Igor's Timeline table is all messed up. Since the start of May (which is when I started to keep track of progress), nothing changed beside a 1 or 2 drop. In some cases it even cause a spike in additional monthly updates. I.e. March went from 115 at the start of my to 122 yesterday (121 today). For the month of Nov-Feb it all stayed the same mostly. And yet I see people that received their NOA2 but never updated it and just went to the NVC section...
So please think of the community and update your timelines correctly. I will post my overview later today when I come home to show what I mean with this.

Hehe I was too, I was very shy at first and browsed around for months before daring to post anything, but everyone is amazing about making you feel welcome and helping with questions, even tiny ones. So before you know it, you're commenting on random threads like you've been here for years

There's been a few people saying in other threads that January and February filers still have another 4 - 5 months to go. I hope this isn't the case. I did number crunching not too long ago and I saw that in March 2014 TSC approved less than 250 petitions a week
My table with October til March CSC vs TSC petitions: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bdkZgfg-0CeJeCcapb9VLk-sr5FG2LWewyZbd5CSUgk/edit#gid=0
Edit: spelling errorz

Hi there, welcome to the forum! I spent months browsing the site before I joined too It's been an incredible help, I'm an official VJ addict now! If you guys decide to start one of the visa processes, make sure to read all the guides on here, huge amount of useful info. And otherwise the site is always good for stories to read in the meantime

Hi there! Kind of welcome to the VJ forum then Your story is great, how awesome that you two found each other after so many years. If you love this forum already, you're going to love it even more in the near future, it's the best thing since sliced bread Good luck with the whole process!

I just found this topic, it's awesome! All the approvals in the regular 'January K-1 filers' thread were bumming me out It's been 4 months and 2 days since my NOA1, I'm starting to get excited about the 22nd of June, when my fiance is going to call the UCSIS and hopefully put in a service request. I really doubt I'll be approved by then anyway, since they haven't touched my file since January..

Expenses: I could be driving a Beamer.
Frustrating : I lost a lot of hair.
Trees : What trees ? I am guilty of killing an entire forest.
Stress: Lets not go there.
All worth it : Oh yes.
Thanks for the chuckles while reading your blog.

Oops! Well, I can see how that happened, there's just so much to sign and date and check. Wouldn't be surprised if I missed something too. Might have, they haven't touched my file since 17 Jan so they wouldn't know..
Good luck with the journey!

Hi everyone! Just found this topic (thanks to Kaylara!) while obsessively browsing VJ during my insane amount of free time. 108 days since NOA1, getting very antsy. Is it weird that I'm excited about being able to call USCIS next month and complain? At least then I'll be able to do something about it.

Wow, that's still a heap of petitions left! Thanks for doing the math I'm a January filer, still no NOA2.. Hope we both get approved soon!

I know you are wondering how long your NOA2 will take, so for perspective here is some information for you.
USCIS has updated their dashboard and added February 2014 to the data here
As of February 2014 there is a backlog of 6,716 petitions awaiting approval
What does this mean?
There are 6,716 petitions awaiting approval in front of all March and April TSC filers
How many approvals have been made per month?
In December there were 1710 petitions completed
In January there were 1465 petitions completed
Lets do some math!
Total number of petitions completed/approved in Jan + Dec = 3,175
31 days in Jan + 31 days in Dec = 62 days.
Minus any weekend days (there were 17 weekend days in total) = 44
That works out to be an average of 72 petitions approved per day (not including weekends) at TSC alone

Hi Nick, welcome to the forum and good luck with the wait! I'm in the Netherlands too and waiting for my NOA2. Hope the Dutch embassy is not too hard on us

Hi there, welcome to the VJ forum! I'm sure if you have questions, you will be answered in no time here I was! Good luck!