rndz

Your comment about an ATM in Thailand makes me a little uncertain if you'll be in the US or Thailand mostly, but we're faced with a similar situation and we're using TD Bank. One of their account tiers (I forget the name) has free checking with a minimum required balance and allows one free international wire transfer per month. It still requires you to visit a branch in person. So, you could have the direct deposit into this account and then make the monthly transfers. If you can't or don't want to do that, you could always use Wise to transfer the money to the Thai account. We use both methods, and I've noticed there's little difference in the net cost. Wise advertises good exchange rates, but you'll pay a fee for each checking-to-checking transfer. The TD Bank wire transfers usually show up the next business day. Sometimes the Wise transfers are instantaneous, and for some reason they've never been able to explain to me sometimes they are delayed for 2 or 3 days, so plan for this if the funds are needed in the destination account immediately.

Had our interview in June cancelled because of an interpreter no-show (we had contracted someone from a local agency to be available by phone). Showed up at rescheduled 11/29 interview and a second interpreter we hired was standing by waiting for our call. Instead, USCIS interviewer called another number somewhere within the organization and was connected to an interpreter almost immediately. Wish we had been this lucky 5 months ago but we were approved and I guess all's well that ends well.

During the recorded answering spiel, say "Infopass" and you'll get into a queue to speak to an agent - at least that has worked for me as recently as last week. We're in the same situation - didn't think there was a need to apply for AP, then my wife had a death in the family. Good luck.

We're November filers and just had something strange happen. Had our interview in June - our interpreter didn't show. The interviewer decided that a hastily-arranged substitute didn't meet his standards and the interview was canceled, with a follow-up NOA indicating that it would be rescheduled. Have heard nothing from the USCIS on the application or new interview date, but in the meantime a family situation almost requires us to travel back to Thailand (we didn't apply for AP with the AOS submission). Last week we submitted the AP application with the hopes that we could have it expedited after it is received. Today we received two separate NOA's for the I-485. The first one notifies us of a rescheduled AOS interview mid-October. The second one cancels the same interview. The Notice Date on both is the same. It seems that these NOA's arrived too quickly to be related to the AP filing - the Notice Date is about 4 business days after I mailed the I-131. But I can't imagine a scenario where an interview would be scheduled and then canceled on the same day.

Although the USCIS does claim to provide phone interpretation services, I would recommend hiring one. I'd also think carefully about using a friend. Here's a little more about our experience. We are in a situation similar to yours - my wife reads and understands English well enough when spoken slowly but we didn't want to risk any confusion during a possibly stressful situation. We contacted a business that provides both in-person and phone interpretation services and arranged for a phone interpreter about two weeks ahead of the interview. One week prior to the interview we had an initial conversation with the interpreter to verify her skills in both languages and confirm that she had done this sort of thing before. The arrangement with this particular company is that you don't have the direct contact information for the interpreter (worrisome, but I can think of a few good reasons for this) and that the interpreter calls you at the scheduled time. We were still in the waiting area at the USCIS office at the scheduled time and there was no call from the interpreter. I contacted the company and they were also unable to reach her. We ended up having about 20 minutes between the scheduled time and when the interviewer was actually ready for us and used this time to contact one of my wife's friends to act as a substitute interpreter. From the start, the interviewer seemed annoyed that my wife's friend (whose English is very good) was not a professional interpreter. We had to fill out the G-1256 form on the fly in the office (name, address, driver's license info) and this put the interview behind schedule. After the interview started, there were some problems with the flow of the interpretation - not interpreting quickly enough or starting too soon and talking over the interviewer. I'm not faulting my wife's friend for this - I was in the room and it wasn't obvious to me either when the interviewer was expecting the interpreter to start speaking. After a couple of these glitches the interviewer declared he was terminating the interview and we would have to reschedule. I asked about the USCIS service, and he said that it could not be pre-arranged and there was no guarantee for our language that an interpreter would be available. I think he was being a bit of a jerk at this point and said that he would try it now - he called a number from his desk and we waited for about 5 minutes on hold listening to music before bailing out.

As others have said, you cannot be the interpreter. My additional comments after a recent bad experience with this: Get as much information as possible (but don't sign!) for the G-1256 form prior to the interview. Most of this relates to the identification of the interpreter. Declare as soon as you meet the interviewer that you will be using a phone interpreter. Every interviewer and office is probably different, but ours seemed to have an attitude about this and acted as if he had the power to not allow this. The USCIS does provide some level of interpretation services, and I imagine they might offer this for a common language like Spanish. Personally, I wouldn't depend on this - our interviewer went through the motions of calling to arrange this on the phone and we were subjected to the same wait music we've heard many times before when trying to contact the USCIS externally.

Interviewed today and we've taken a step backwards. We had pre-arranged a phone interpreter (with a company that supposedly does this as a business) and neither we nor the company could find the person at the time of the interview. Tried to continue with an acquaintance and the interviewer stopped the interview after a couple of glitches in the question and answer process flow. The interviewer rejected the translated versions of a couple of documents were submitted with both the I-129f and I-485 - don't understand why this wasn't covered in an RFE instead of waiting until the interview.

We also wanted a fully typeset document for our submission and ended up using PDFescape - of course, the disclaimer here is that their site will store a copy of your information. The process is somewhat tedious, but first we saved a copy of the PDF with as much of the content filled out in Adobe as possible. Then we uploaded it to the site and cut and pasted the Thai information (created in a word processing doc with the Thai character set) as appropriate. I think the site just rasterizes the document, so it won't be just filling in the blanks - you'll have to spend a little time aligning the content with the form. One advantage, besides appearance, is that after doing this you'll have an electronic image for printing copies later if needed.

In our NOA for the AOS interview the letter states that we may have an interpreter available by phone and we have someone who will do this for us (not a professional interpreter, but fluent in Thai and English). When I was digging into this a little more, I see the USCIS apparently requires form G-1256 from both parties, signed in the presence of the interviewer. Asking anyone who has used a phone interpreter how they handled this -- thanks.

I forgot to mention that another alternative is to use one of the online sites that will let you upload a PDF and add edits wherever you want. Of course, with these you have to understand that you are losing control over your information. I can't remember if it was the I-129F, but we had some trouble getting a lengthy Thai address in the Thai character set entered into the downloaded PDF and went this route.

If you opened the form from the link on the USCIS web page, your browser has opened the form in whatever application is used by your browser. As per a previous reply here, download the form and open specifically with an Adobe app.