
CMJuilland
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CMJuilland reacted to Ybhamster in I-129F November 2016 Filers
The teams at the Service Centers are made up of 20 people each and about 8-10 of them work family based immigration requests that include I-129F cases. Each box pulled by a worker contains 20-40 cases that include all the types of petitions that the team works meaning I-129F cases are sprinkled in throughout each box. When a worker gets a box they are supposed to sort the cases by how much research is needed per case with longer research times going to "special" teams that are made up of more seasoned workers that work exclusively with the supervisor of the team as they cases can require supervisor and manager approval to approve. Longer research times can be indicated as a petitioner with a criminal history, lack of perceived evidence for one of the petition requirements, a waiver requested by the petitioner, multiple foreign marriages, etc. I got this information from an interview of a Service Center director from 2012 and from a friend of mine at USCIS.
In addition, I heard on the podcast, "This American Life", that the number of DACA applicants quadrupled after the election this year. According to my friend at immigration, they are in the family based immigration category.
Fiance visas are usually considered "fun" work by workers at the Service Centers as they are fairly straightforward cases and allow them to get their stats up. That being said they are usually set aside for the end of the day as they as quick and more intensive cases such as I-130's are worked earlier in the day.
I hope this helps.
By the way friends, a congressional inquiry at anytime in the process, before or after 6 months is just that an inquiry. A case worker at your representatives office will contact their congressional liaison at USCIS who will contact the supervisor of the congressional liaison of the family based immigration teams who will check on your case. This process takes at least a week and can in no way expedite your case unless it is accompanied with expedite paperwork that meets USCIS expedited case request guidelines. Congressional staff are prohibited from asking for expedited without the proper USCIS paperwork filled out by the petitioner. Plus USCIS receives no funding from Congress so they have no urgency other than to maintain good relations with Congress as all other federal agencies are required to do.
Although it sucks to be in this waiting game and painful to hear, the workers at USCIS don't feel like there is any slowdown in their processing. They are working cases as normal and have 6 months to do so. Literally nothing happens if they don't meet that "deadline" as it is one that they set internally for themselves. They move the goal based on the workload that they have.
Also remember that immigration, although I-129F's are processed by workers paid for exclusively using the fees we paid for this process, is a highly political process. Any bureaucrat, political perception, or anything perceived to be within the interest of USCIS can affect the process.
If you want to know that perception of the process from the public and not someone going through it, then just look at shows such as "90 day fiance" and Syed Farook, the San Bernardino bomber. It is either something that shouldn't be allowed as it is seen as the "easy" way into the United States or a laugh stock as it lets in couple who have "questionable love" for their significant others.
In reality as we all know and statistic bear out, that it is a trying and expensive process which only about 54% of couple actually make it through with 34% actually getting married due to alien fiances usually getting cold feet about immigrating.
Good luck to all. Hopefully we will all hear good news soon and the processing of the petitions will speed up dramatically.
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CMJuilland reacted to geowrian in I-129F November 2016 Filers
Initial scan completed...off to work (darn weekdays!), but I'm going to put this out there so you guys can run the data however you want. I'm still working on the daily-update pieces. These are ONLY K1 apps.
Note: There's a bug with a few cases that show a future date. This is because USCIS....for some reason...doesn't have a date updated field on those cases, so my script mistakenly pulled the date from the wrong part of the status. These are are very few and far between, but that's why there's a few cases with February dates in the data.
This covers K1s from 1790048000 to 1790108000.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1B_oR3Imoi-Y0l3a0ZpYk81SXc
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CMJuilland reacted to JimJesDuma in I-129F November 2016 Filers
Hi CM,
Thanks for posting this and hope you can do it every few days.
Jim
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CMJuilland got a reaction from Anthony and Bobby in I-129F November 2016 Filers
I'm using the iPhone case tracker app, and my figures come from there. VJ only is just a small part and, IMHO, not all that representative anyway... I do this each day, and I'll try to remember to post it here every day as well.
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CMJuilland got a reaction from Anthony and Bobby in I-129F November 2016 Filers
I have held off with posting my searches on the app up until now, but I figured since I have an Excel sheet where I track it anyway, why not share the day-to-day results. Now, I haven't gone the extra mile of tracking exactly where one date starts and another date stops; using trial and error though, I started tracking K1-petitions starting at WAC1790044500 and ending at WAC1790052899 (received between Oct 28 and Nov 2).
Out of all these numbers, there are 836 K1-petitions, out of which 53 were rejected after about 2 days due to reasons such as failing to sign or sending an incorrect fee. As of Monday (Jan 23) night, there are 273 approvals, 131 RFEs, and 379 unworked cases (category is called other, and as far as I know cases that are withdrawn and a few other things go into the same category).
While 379 may sound like a horrendous figure for only 3 days, compared to 2 weeks ago (9 business days; Jan 9), they really did make a move; on Jan 9, there were 544 unworked cases. While the amount of petitions worked on each day may seem small, at least they're touching them again - as Jim and others stated already, they didn't really do anything for almost a month a couple of weeks ago.
Anyway, I hope you guys have a great day - and yet again: to more approvals this week!!
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CMJuilland got a reaction from JimJesDuma in I-129F November 2016 Filers
I'm using the iPhone case tracker app, and my figures come from there. VJ only is just a small part and, IMHO, not all that representative anyway... I do this each day, and I'll try to remember to post it here every day as well.
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CMJuilland got a reaction from JimJesDuma in I-129F November 2016 Filers
I have held off with posting my searches on the app up until now, but I figured since I have an Excel sheet where I track it anyway, why not share the day-to-day results. Now, I haven't gone the extra mile of tracking exactly where one date starts and another date stops; using trial and error though, I started tracking K1-petitions starting at WAC1790044500 and ending at WAC1790052899 (received between Oct 28 and Nov 2).
Out of all these numbers, there are 836 K1-petitions, out of which 53 were rejected after about 2 days due to reasons such as failing to sign or sending an incorrect fee. As of Monday (Jan 23) night, there are 273 approvals, 131 RFEs, and 379 unworked cases (category is called other, and as far as I know cases that are withdrawn and a few other things go into the same category).
While 379 may sound like a horrendous figure for only 3 days, compared to 2 weeks ago (9 business days; Jan 9), they really did make a move; on Jan 9, there were 544 unworked cases. While the amount of petitions worked on each day may seem small, at least they're touching them again - as Jim and others stated already, they didn't really do anything for almost a month a couple of weeks ago.
Anyway, I hope you guys have a great day - and yet again: to more approvals this week!!
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CMJuilland got a reaction from Chelleyandaaron in I-129F November 2016 Filers
I have held off with posting my searches on the app up until now, but I figured since I have an Excel sheet where I track it anyway, why not share the day-to-day results. Now, I haven't gone the extra mile of tracking exactly where one date starts and another date stops; using trial and error though, I started tracking K1-petitions starting at WAC1790044500 and ending at WAC1790052899 (received between Oct 28 and Nov 2).
Out of all these numbers, there are 836 K1-petitions, out of which 53 were rejected after about 2 days due to reasons such as failing to sign or sending an incorrect fee. As of Monday (Jan 23) night, there are 273 approvals, 131 RFEs, and 379 unworked cases (category is called other, and as far as I know cases that are withdrawn and a few other things go into the same category).
While 379 may sound like a horrendous figure for only 3 days, compared to 2 weeks ago (9 business days; Jan 9), they really did make a move; on Jan 9, there were 544 unworked cases. While the amount of petitions worked on each day may seem small, at least they're touching them again - as Jim and others stated already, they didn't really do anything for almost a month a couple of weeks ago.
Anyway, I hope you guys have a great day - and yet again: to more approvals this week!!
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CMJuilland got a reaction from mzladyq in I-129F November 2016 Filers
Lol, random and completely off topic, but "thanks" to USCIS's slowdown, our thread is almost 100 pages long already.
Anyway. I would agree with our kind of visa not belonging into the family sponsored category listed in the bulletin. As others have pointed out already, it's one of the few that does not have a cap or anything the like, not to mention the nonimmigrant part (with intent to immigrate). Whatever happens at USCIS's, I'm trying not to worry since we started seeing movement, especially last week, and I just hope that this will keep up (and, being optimistic here, speed up, too). That way, we will keep seeing Nov approvals coming day after day. Sure, they could come faster, but complaining before the 5-6-whatever-month period is up doesn't help anyway.
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CMJuilland got a reaction from JimJesDuma in I-129F November 2016 Filers
Lol, random and completely off topic, but "thanks" to USCIS's slowdown, our thread is almost 100 pages long already.
Anyway. I would agree with our kind of visa not belonging into the family sponsored category listed in the bulletin. As others have pointed out already, it's one of the few that does not have a cap or anything the like, not to mention the nonimmigrant part (with intent to immigrate). Whatever happens at USCIS's, I'm trying not to worry since we started seeing movement, especially last week, and I just hope that this will keep up (and, being optimistic here, speed up, too). That way, we will keep seeing Nov approvals coming day after day. Sure, they could come faster, but complaining before the 5-6-whatever-month period is up doesn't help anyway.
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CMJuilland got a reaction from JimJesDuma in I-129F November 2016 Filers
We didn't even submit pictures (largely because we don't really have all that many; we just forget to take them...). But I also made a list with all the meetings we've had (time period and place / country / region) in the last 12.5 years, I included the digital copy of my I94 (current passport), boarding passes for the both of us for a flight within the U.S., and train tickets from Germany... If we get an RFE, I guess, it would be because there is one box on the i-129F that we forgot (and that's really upsetting because I went over the whole thing about 20 times before submitting).
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CMJuilland got a reaction from Iris M in I-129F November 2016 Filers
We didn't even submit pictures (largely because we don't really have all that many; we just forget to take them...). But I also made a list with all the meetings we've had (time period and place / country / region) in the last 12.5 years, I included the digital copy of my I94 (current passport), boarding passes for the both of us for a flight within the U.S., and train tickets from Germany... If we get an RFE, I guess, it would be because there is one box on the i-129F that we forgot (and that's really upsetting because I went over the whole thing about 20 times before submitting).
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CMJuilland got a reaction from JimJesDuma in I-129F November 2016 Filers
Either that or an expedite. You can request that if your fiancé(e) or you are in very poor health, if the beneficiary's country is in a crisis, or if the petitioner has deployment orders with the U.S. military. A congressional, which usually also results in an expedite, is less likely, but nonetheless an option. Oh, hopefully, USCIS picks up their pace again and starts approving even more cases a day this week than they did last week... Have a great start into this new week everybody!
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CMJuilland got a reaction from Chelleyandaaron in I-129F November 2016 Filers
Wow, I've just finished filling out the DS-160 form (thanks for the suggestion, Jim), and it required me to list ALL of my previous U.S. travel... Now, that took me a while... My fiancée and I have known each other for over 10 years, and while we now look back and admit that we fell in love right when we first met, rationality had taken over for years, and we were "just friends" (or trying to be anyway) because there was no way for us to be on one continent, let alone one country. Nonetheless, we have always regularly visited each other, and ever since our relationship "officially" changed to "something more serious" about 2.5 years ago to "something serious" about 2 years ago to "something very serious" about 1.5 years ago, and then to "engaged" in spring of last year, visits have increased tremendously... Writing this down here makes me hope and pray even more that we really are on the final stretch of being separated after all these years. I know I usually try to come off as patient and full of hope, so please forgive me my five seconds of tantrum: I WANT OUR NOA2!!!
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CMJuilland got a reaction from mzladyq in I-129F November 2016 Filers
Oh, I'm so so so happy for you! What a great gift for your anniversary. Now, off to a great weekend and then the rest of the journey. Congratulations
And for those of us still waiting - let's not lose hope. Our turn will hopefully come soon.
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CMJuilland reacted to mzladyq in I-129F November 2016 Filers
guuuuuuuys i got approved!!!!!!! on our anniversary!... TODAY was terrible ended up crying and driving 2 hours back home from visiting my family.....long story anyways when i got home around one am ...i got a notification that my case was approved.... i was just on the fone with my fiance crying telling him how much i couldnt take it and as i hung up.... IM APPROVED>>> now im all of a sudden sad by the people who arent approved yet because i know how it feels seeing approval after approval. But i guess that means one step closer to your case.
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CMJuilland got a reaction from VictoriaS208 in I-129F November 2016 Filers
According to the California Service Center processing times information chart, the CSC is now processing petitions as of August 16, 2016 (data as of November 30, 2016). However, as you said yourself, they have also been approving cases filed at the end of October / beginning of November at a fairly steady rate this and last week. I understand your concerns; I'm in the same boat, but I also keep my hopes up that our NOA2s will start coming soon. Don't lose hope
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CMJuilland got a reaction from Chelleyandaaron in I-129F November 2016 Filers
According to the California Service Center processing times information chart, the CSC is now processing petitions as of August 16, 2016 (data as of November 30, 2016). However, as you said yourself, they have also been approving cases filed at the end of October / beginning of November at a fairly steady rate this and last week. I understand your concerns; I'm in the same boat, but I also keep my hopes up that our NOA2s will start coming soon. Don't lose hope
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CMJuilland got a reaction from JimJesDuma in I-129F November 2016 Filers
We all do, I guess... At least we see some movement on our petitions and dates now, although yesterday's was basically just RFEs. But honestly, I would much rather get an RFE at some point (and rather soon) than being in a limbo and made to believe that they lost our petition again... For the moment, though, I am hopeful and keep myself busy with my job and the organization of me moving away from my country (lists of stuff to get rid of, etc.); that usually helps. Hope all of you have something to distract yourselves from the painful wait as well.
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CMJuilland got a reaction from mzladyq in I-129F November 2016 Filers
Although I am not religious myself, I find this an extremely nice and sweet gesture. Thank you so much, mzladyq! And I agree, let's keep positive energy coming. Have a great day, everyone!
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CMJuilland got a reaction from BoracayBao in I-129F November 2016 Filers
Although I am not religious myself, I find this an extremely nice and sweet gesture. Thank you so much, mzladyq! And I agree, let's keep positive energy coming. Have a great day, everyone!
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CMJuilland got a reaction from JimJesDuma in I-129F November 2016 Filers
By the way, my fiancée and I already filed a petition, paid the fee and everything back in May, but never received an NOA1, so after calling them several times, we found out that USCIS actually lost our petition; it was nowhere to be found in the system, so we had to do it again...
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CMJuilland got a reaction from Chelleyandaaron in I-129F November 2016 Filers
WOW!! Thank you very very much for that chart!!
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CMJuilland got a reaction from Chelleyandaaron in I-129F November 2016 Filers
I understand your anger and frustration, I really do. However, I don't think that canceling your I-129F at this stage would be a good idea. First of, you would have the long wait again, and only God (and USCIS) knows how many more people filed between the time you did and now. Waiting for NOA2 is something that happens extremely rarely; it is really not as common as your post indicates it must be. Secondly, nobody can guarantee you that your wait would not be even longer this time, and that would come on top of the weeks and months you have already had so far. Finally, the fees have increased, so you would not pay another $340, but $500+ (I don't know the exact amount).
As for contacting your congressperson, I read in a Q & A with a former USCIS adjudicator somewhere here on VJ that congressional inquiries make your case a priority under most circumstances. However, your congressperson will most likely not inquire about your case after "only" (yeah, I know...) three months as they would go by processing times posted online, and officially, USCIS is working on cases received on August 16 right now.
I know it is cold comfort, and trust me, I hear you loud and clear, but just because USCIS started to make a move on people filing later than you did does not mean that everybody else gets pushed to the side. We filed later than you did, but I have still seen a handful of people whose petitions were received on the same date ours was or later being approved, whereas our petition hasn't even been touched anymore since it was put into the system. I'm really sorry you feel so desperate, but please try hanging in there a little longer; I think everything else would just cost you even more time, energy, and money.
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CMJuilland got a reaction from JSWH in I-129F November 2016 Filers
Okay, I'm a total freak when it comes to numbers, so I started that game as well, and not only for our receipt date. Granted, I'm a little lazier than you guys; I didn't take the time to look at what exact number a certain date starts; I check cases for a couple of days before up until our receipt date (Nov 2), i.e. WAC1790044500 up until WAC1790053000. I even have an excel sheet where I keep track of all of that. Living in Europe, I usually do the search in the morning, and I see quite some approvals compared to Thursday. In order for me not to get locked out of the app (case tracker for iPhone), I also noted within which 500 batch there are i129Fs and where there are none. So, for all these cases, there are a bit under 500 (491 to be exact) unworked / withdrawn / whatever (category is called "other"), 117 approved, 53 RFEs, and 110 rejections.
Oh, and in order not to get locked out of the app so often, I usually switch off my WIFI when I run the search. If I still get locked out, I can just run it again when I'm in a different area. It may take a little longer sometimes, but at least I get to run my searches. Anyway. Seeing roughly 20 cases looked at for Thursday and another 20 for yesterday gives me hope that ours could be adjudicated within about a month. Also, USCIS - NVC seems to have gotten back to the normal couple of days as opposed to the 4-week wait back in November and December, so that's something to keep in mind as well. Have a great weekend everyone, and since Monday is a holiday, let's hope there isn't another slowdown due to inauguration next Friday. Keeping my fingers crossed for all of us; may we all get an approval soon.
On another, more personal note, my fiancée and I have done the LDR thing for far too long; we've known each other for more than a decade, and over the last couple of years, ever since our relationship became more serious, we have literally invested 10s of thousands of $$ in airline tickets between the two of us. While it's always the greatest feeling to arrive at the airport of each other's country, it's always just as devastating boarding the plane to leave... And while I personally take comfort in seeing so many other people in the same situation we are in (for many years, I could never find anyone to understand as I didn't know anybody in an LDR with 1000s of miles between them), it also deeply saddens me that there are so many people here who are on the same emotional rollercoaster ride. Wishing us all the energy to stay happy despite everything we're going through.