rubix

Quite happy to share that we got a CC today.
Timing for those doing EP: Sent AOS checklist response on June 5. CC after 31 business days.
Best wishes to everyone else still making their way through NVC. May your lucky day come soon!

Quite happy to share that we got a CC today.
Timing for those doing EP: Sent AOS checklist response on June 5. CC after 31 business days.
Best wishes to everyone else still making their way through NVC. May your lucky day come soon!

Quite happy to share that we got a CC today.
Timing for those doing EP: Sent AOS checklist response on June 5. CC after 31 business days.
Best wishes to everyone else still making their way through NVC. May your lucky day come soon!

Quite happy to share that we got a CC today.
Timing for those doing EP: Sent AOS checklist response on June 5. CC after 31 business days.
Best wishes to everyone else still making their way through NVC. May your lucky day come soon!

Quite happy to share that we got a CC today.
Timing for those doing EP: Sent AOS checklist response on June 5. CC after 31 business days.
Best wishes to everyone else still making their way through NVC. May your lucky day come soon!

It definitely helps to hear from two people who had about the same response time. Let's see if I can make it three. ;-)
Thanks for the info!

I checked out this post in the April 2013 filers' forum....
The filer typed the text of the email from a staffer at USCIS, who is responsible for responding to congressional inquiries. Apparently, the filer contacted his or her Congressman, and the Congressman's office kindly forwarded the reply to the filer. The filer then re-typed the reply with the personal information redacted.
A few observations:
- Field office adjudications - I've scoured the message boards for March filers - September filers, and I see very few people saying that their I-130's had been transferred for adjudication at field offices. One of our July filers above did get an interview at a field office, but that was a concurrent I-130 and I-485 submission - somebody whose spouse was already here on an F-1 student visa when they married. Take out the expedited cases and other exceptions, and just look at standalone I-130s (us), and you don't see many March-Sept 2013 filers saying that their respective field offices are handling their cases. Those that are reported are more recent. For months I-130s held by the NBC have been going nowhere, just backlogging, if our anecdotal reporting is true, and I believe it is.
- The 9-12 month prediction. What was USCIS's prior, projected wait times, for standalone I-130's? On the phone, on their websites, from you, I've heard various official predictions. Usually, it was around 6-9 months and my study of the VisaJourney timelines for pre-March 2013 filers was showing a median wait time of around 5 months. Their new 9-12 month prediction is larger than what we have heard before, and this correlates with USCIS's management of the NBC that we have been observing and deploring. So now, we have some evidence that they know that the process is elongating, which they have not admitted before.
- Reason to hope. The note above says that the reason for the 9-12 month wait time is the backlog at the field offices. But not all field offices are the same. Some workloads are bigger than others. Check your local field office. You might find that your field office (like mine) has a fairly light workload. That is why I went to my field office last month and asked them if they could request my file from the mountain of applications accruing at NBC. They could not or would not do that at that time, but if the NBC does get around to farming out our I-130s to the field offices, at least some of us might benefit. I would not be so sure that the NYC office is slow, as someone lamented here, because we don't know what their staffing levels are. Yes, they might have many applications, but they also might have many competent staffers - we just don't know how quickly they are buzzing through the standalone I-130s, nor, whether they are labeling standalone I-130s as high priority cases, as statutory law requires.
My guess is that the timelines for standalone I-130 adjudications are growing, and that May 2013 to November 2013 filers will be hit the hardest, then the timelines will begin to shorten again.
Some of us July filers, and certainly some filing in subsequent months might want to consider the K-3 visa. You might recall that lawyers were discouraging standalone I-130 filers from filing a K-3 for their spouses, because the wait time for I-130s had been cut, and the K-3 wait time, extended. That was before the I-130s began to backlog with NBC in March-April 2013, or before the lawyers apparently became wise to this (I'm not sure they are aware of this now). So, since the wait time for I-130s is probably growing, it might now make sense to go for a K-3. I forget the filing fee off the top of my head (something < $1,000), but even if it cuts a month or two from our time apart, it might be worth it.
We are not going to opt for the K-3, since we are already 2+ months from our NOA1, and she can be here on the visa waiver program for 3 months at a time. But some of us, especially people filing the I-130 now, might be together more quickly.
Incidentally, there is a petition up on the White House website that we can sign, asking to speed the I-130 processing time for our immediate family members. It could be written better, but it's there, and had 600 signatures, last I saw it. We need 1,000+ more signatures before the WH will consider it. Unfortunately, they measure the eligibility of the petitions by the number of signers, not by the intensity of our aggregate dissatisfaction.
I remain convinced that we should all be prepared for a long wait, and make our plans accordingly. The USCIS does not show that they are interested in our group's inconvenience, and we are too few in number to get the attention of the higher-placed officials. The best we can do, I think, is to just organize our family's lives within these constraints.
We married foreigners, I assume, because we met people worth the time and distance. I know that I sure did. In remembering this, maybe the wait will sting a little less.
--Alaskafan
NOA1: July 15, 2013