Zan1

Hey, sorry you’re stuck in NVC purgatory! There’s nothing more frustrating and demoralising, especially with the phone lines closed. I hope that things are sorted quickly for you. The missing piece in my timeline is that I contacted my wife’s congressperson on Sept 7th and his office began a congressional inquiry on our behalf. I’m not sure if that’s what got things moving or if it was coincidence, but we got DQ a few weeks later. So the final timeline was: Submit FE W2 doc May 18 -> no reply after timeframe page update, sent NVC inquiry Aug 8th -> NVC response Aug 10th -> contacted congressperson Sept 7th -> DQ finally on Sept 30th -> notification of interview Nov 25th -> interview date Jan 11th. I can’t speak to the mystery CEAC notification, but I’d definitely recommend getting in touch with a congressperson or other representative if you can’t get information any other way. That seems to have been what did the trick for us.

That's good news, thanks for that! Hopefully there's not some silly 1 year cut off or anything. It doesn't say anywhere that they expire so it would seem unfair to suddenly spring that upon me at the interview. I'll probably end up emailing them to confirm, but I'd hate to remind them to check the date or something hahaha Thanks for the congratulations! Sooo close to the end now.

I got my DQ notice on 30th September and interview notice on 25th November.

Hi all, resurrecting a bit of an old thread here but I wanted to get some advice. I've been scheduled for my IR-1 interview in the second week of January. Prior to this I was stuck at the NVC for pretty much bang on a year, so the I-864 and tax transcript I originally submitted (and for a joint sponsor too) are over a year old at this point. Same deal with the police certificate that I submitted. I see on this page that I'll need to submit an new police certificate so I'm in the process of organising that. Does anyone know if I'll need to update the two I-864 and tax transcripts? This page here says that I don't need to provide them at all because I originally submitted them to the NVC, but I was intending on printing them out and including them in my documents packet just in case. It's going to be a right pain if I have to provide updated ones at this stage so I'm hoping that the ones I've already submitted will suffice. Thanks for the help!

This is really helpful - thanks so much!

Hi all, I received an email from the NVC last week confirming that my IR-1 interview has been scheduled at the Auckland, New Zealand Consulate (phew! 🎉). I have a date and a time, and I've booked in for my medical exam a few weeks in advance. At the moment I'm trying to piece together exactly what I need for my interview based on the link that was included in my NVC email https://nvc.state.gov/prep (specifically https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/Supplements/Supplements_by_Post/ACK-Auckland.html). Some of it isn't very clear and I'm a little confused as to what to do. One page in the link above says "You do not need to bring your Affidavit of Support or financial evidence you submitted to NVC." whereas another page says "The appropriate Form I-846 Affidavit of Support for each financial sponsor along with a photocopy of the sponsor's IRS transcript or most recent U.S. federal income tax return, and any relevant W-2s.". If I've already submitted an I-846 and tax transcript to the NVC, do I need to also bring the original to the interview as well? The Auckland Consulate instructions page requests that I deliver a packet of documents to the Consulate by hand a week in advance of the interview, but there's no mention of being able to courier these documents. I presume that I'm able to courier them? I was reading interview reviews for the Auckland Consulate and I see a few mentions of bringing a 'self addressed courier bag' to the interview. This isn't mentioned anywhere in my NVC email or in the link above. Is this something I need? Should I expect to receive an email directly from the Auckland Consulate which will clear a lot of this up? I'll email the Consulate directly if I need to in order to get some answers, but I figured I'd ask here first. Thanks very much for your help!

Thanks! So excited to finally be moving on! We submitted our first round of documents in September 2021, got an RFE for missing W2 tax documents in December 2021, submitted a letter explaining why we didn't have them in January 2022, got another RFE in May 2022 for the same thing, resubmitted our letter the next day and now finally we've got DQ.

My wife and I finally got DQ this morning after waiting four and a half months for review of a single document submitted on the 12th May! It's been so stressful being in complete darkness about what's going on behind the scenes with our case and we still have no idea what the delay was, but we've finally moved on from the NVC after a full year of submissions and resubmissions and waiting. We submitted a public inquiry in the first week of August after our case review date came and went, and we also requested a congressperson inquire on our behalf about a month ago, so who knows if one of those pulled through for us or if it was just luck. But we're waiting on an interview date now and can put this all behind us soon. Hopefully it's smooth sailing from here!

It’s a long story! We submitted all of our NVC documents in October 2021 and waited until January 2022 to have them reviewed. We got an FE Note requesting that my wife provide her W2 tax documents. We’ve both been living abroad together for a few years, so she didn’t have a W2 to provide (which really they should have pieced together from her other tax documents) and we’re using a joint sponsor so the tax documents are more of a formality anyway. We wrote a letter explaining why we didn’t have any W2 documents to provide and submitted it in January. We then waited another 3 months until May for them to review the letter, only to find another FE Note asking for W2 documents again. We called the NVC (they still had the phone lines open at the time) to find out what was going on, only to discover that we’d accidentally attached the wrong letter! So we submitted the right letter in early May and waited another 3 months for a review. That was supposed to be in early August, but we’ve not heard anything and our letter is just sitting there “Submitted”. It should have been reviewed weeks ago so we can only assume that our case has been missed or forgotten about. The phone lines are closed so we can’t call the NVC and the public inquiry form has a 2 month wait time for a response. We have no way of knowing why we’re held up or of notifying the NVC that something’s gone wrong. We’re just kind of stuck in purgatory right now. We’ve been trapped at the NVC for pretty close to a year just because of this tax document that we don’t even have and it’s so extremely frustrating! I think contacting a senator or representative is the best way forward now because it’s the only way we can talk to someone directly. At least my wife and I are together. I can’t imagine how painful this would be if she was back in the US!

This is a really thorough response, thanks! I’ve had a look at the website of my wife’s representative and they have a note on their contact page that says ‘if you’re having a problem with a federal agency (immigration, social security, veterans affairs etc) please call my office directly on phone number. Do not use the Write Your Rep system as it will result in a delay in processing your case.’ The fact that they have that in their website is a pretty promising sign! My wife will try giving them a call on Monday and if that doesn’t work we’ll try getting in contact with a senator. Hopefully we can get this resolved more quickly than having to wait the two months for our public inquiry form to be seen. Good luck with the rest of your visa process! Hopefully you hear back next week and the interview isn’t too much later. Really appreciate the advice!

Hi, thanks for your advice. We’re considering contacting my wife’s US Representative but weren’t sure whether we should wait to (hopefully) hear back from our public enquiry. You said that you contacted them a month ago? Seems like that’s much faster than waiting the two months for the public enquiry. Did you just send them an email or something?

Oh yeah, honestly I’m losing my mind! It’s just a completely hopeless situation not being able to call to find out what’s gone wrong. I have no idea if the response I received is good or bad or means anything at all. I’m completely in the dark as to whether anyone is or will be looking into my case. I’m just stressed to the max right now!

Hi, no nothing yet unfortunately. I submitted a public enquiry form on the 8th August and got the following response on the 11th August that I’ve been told by the lovely people here is an automated reply: So for now it’s a still a very, very frustrating waiting game.

It's nice to know that I'm not the only person that's had these issues. I'm sorry that you've had to go through it as well! Did you get a response to your inquiry back in July that said "The correspondence submitted is currently under review. An appropriate action will be taken once this review is completed." or did you have to wait until August to hear anything at all?

Thanks for your response. Sorry, yeah you're right it's two months. I misread the month as July - that's disappointing! So the email that I received this morning was just a receipt that my message was received? I got a confirmation email from a TSGSystem address when I submitted my message, but the one I got this morning was from an actual person: Do they have a person monitoring all incoming messages and giving canned responses? Seems like a weird waste of resources! I just don't want to end up in a situation where I wait two months to get a response only to find that I'd actually got one that I never followed up on - I thought that maybe I got a lucky response, the same way that sometimes people have their documents reviewed the day after they submit them instead of having to wait at several months at the back of the queue.