Einhver

1 hour ago, metuchen said:

Ah nice ... and is the receipt number in general emailed/texted to applicants? 

I believe so. It is definitely on the NOA1 letter.

1 minute ago, metuchen said:

That's good news. Where do you see this?

Put any number between those two in here: https://egov.uscis.gov/casestatus/landing.do

They just processed 19 more I-129Fs today, 18 of them with receipt dates of October 30th. Every case from WAC2190025113 through WAC2190025131 is an I-129F receipt. It looks like they are starting to take the backlog seriously!

There isn't quite a total standstill - all of these I-129Fs have been processed this week:

On January 12, 2021, we received your Form I-129F, Petition for Alien Fiancé(e), Receipt Number WAC2190024009, and sent you the receipt notice that describes how we will process your case.

On October 30, 2020, we received your Form I-129F, Petition for Alien Fiancé(e), Receipt Number WAC2190024039, and sent you the receipt notice that describes how we will process your case.

On January 19, 2021, we rejected your Form I-129F, Petition for Alien Fiancé(e), Receipt Number WAC2190024225, because it was not filed correctly.  We mailed your case back to you, including any supporting materials and fee.

On October 30, 2020, we received your Form I-129F, Petition for Alien Fiancé(e), Receipt Number WAC2190024226, and sent you the receipt notice that describes how we will process your case.

On October 30, 2020, we received your Form I-129F, Petition for Alien Fiancé(e), Receipt Number WAC2190024269, and sent you the receipt notice that describes how we will process your case.

On October 30, 2020, we received your Form I-129F, Petition for Alien Fiancé(e), Receipt Number WAC2190024270, and sent you the receipt notice that describes how we will process your case.

On December 15, 2020, we received your Form I-129F, Petition for Alien Fiancé(e), Receipt Number WAC2190024801, and sent you the receipt notice that describes how we will process your case.

On January 11, 2021, we received your Form I-129F, Petition for Alien Fiancé(e), Receipt Number WAC2190024839, and sent you the receipt notice that describes how we will process your case.

On January 14, 2021, we received your Form I-129F, Petition for Alien Fiancé(e), Receipt Number WAC2190024975, and sent you the receipt notice that describes how we will process your case.

On January 14, 2021, we received your Form I-129F, Petition for Alien Fiancé(e), Receipt Number WAC2190024976, and sent you the receipt notice that describes how we will process your case.

They are definitely going really slowly for majority of I-129Fs with receipt dates from late October onwards although a few lucky people with November/December/January receipt dates have received NOA1 already - I wonder if these are expedited cases or faster for another reason.

13 hours ago, Vamp.nz said:

Absolutely agree. It’s now coming up nine weeks since ours was delivered.  It shocks me that USCIS were saying just a few weeks ago how they were running at a huge loss and needed more money and wanted to increase costs... yet our check and so many more are just sitting there unbanked... it doesn’t make sense does it

It looks like part of the reason why the lockbox is delayed is because it is processing a lot of AOS applications, and AOS applications have a higher fee than I-129Fs, so purely in terms of cashing as many dollars of checks as quickly as possible it would still make sense for the lockbox to leave I-129Fs at the bottom of the pile. They don't take the fee until they have looked at the petition and haven't found any reasons to reject it.

It looks like on 8th January USCIS changed the AOS filing addresses page such that fewer are now sent to the Dallas lockbox, which should mean the Dallas lockbox will be under less load going forward and the I-129F NOA1 delay should get better soon. Compare the list of states which file to the Dallas lockbox on https://www.uscis.gov/i-485-addresses with https://web.archive.org/web/20201111215552/https://www.uscis.gov/i-485-addresses from November.

Biden's press secretary said on Twitter that the travel ban will not be removed.

It looks like they indeed are backdating the receipt dates as they said they would in the press release. A case status added yesterday (January 15th) acknowledged a receipt date of October 29th 2020.

This could be good news if despite being delayed 2+ months in getting the receipt notice, our official receipt dates won't be. I.e. the time we are waiting right now is already counting against our case processing time from receipt date to NOA2, currently about 8 months.

14 hours ago, mrveg said:

Where do you get this data from?  Can you link?

While I don't know how this user aggregated the data, all case statuses can be queried by anyone here: https://egov.uscis.gov/casestatus/landing.do

For the 2021 fiscal year (which began October 1st 2020), there currently seems to be statuses available between receipt numbers WAC2190000001 through approximately WAC2190023000 although increasing in number by the day. I'm still learning about this stuff myself so would be glad to hear if anyone knows anything about this data that I have missed out, as I still don't quite get the the logic in how receipt numbers are allocated or if there are any others outside of this range.

The US postal service has had big delays over the holiday season and into January. Even with priority mail it took almost 3 weeks for our filing to arrive. So it is possible that it is still on its way to you and could arrive in a few days, but it is still worth asking for another duplicate to be sent out just in case.

Our second I-129F attempt finally got through the holidays USPS pile-up and has been delivered... counting the days until (hopefully) NOA1 now!

Sent 2 weeks ago... Stuck in USPS delays and still not yet delivered to the USCIS lockbox.

Update on my case filed in early October: It did indeed get rejected for including a $510 fee instead of $535. It took us just over a month and a half to receive the full rejected I-129F package back in the post and there was never an email/text/any attempt to take payment.

After considering CR-1 as an alternative we realized that it is just too difficult to marry anywhere in the current climate of travel bans and mandatory quarantine (15 days in Mexico or Turkey to get into the US? Thanks but no) so we are re-filing K-1 this December with the correct fee this time. Fingers crossed this still has us on track to be living together and married in the US by Autumn 2021.

I am at 5 weeks with no NOA1.

6 hours ago, Greenbaum said:

They will return the entire packet back to the petitioner requiring the updated amount. They process nothing if the payment is not right on the money so to say. They could call USCIS customer service to determine if that is the issue.

 

Thank you for your reply and insight. We still haven't received the packet back or any response from USCIS. Not feeling great that this could add another 2-3 months to our wait if we get told we have to refile. >.<

The only upside of this that I can see is that if fees stay at the current level until we get to the AOS stage then we'll save over $1000 getting the work permit and travel authorization compared to if the October 2nd 2020 Final Fee Rule had come into effect, but of course there is no guarantee that the fees won't change before we reach that point.

We filed I-129F at the beginning of October with a check for $510, because we had seen the news about the fee going down as of 2nd October 2020 but did not see the news in time that the fee changes had been cancelled.

It has been over 4 weeks now and there has been no money withdrawn from the bank account, no SMS and no NOA1 letter.

What is likely to happen at this point? We are well behind the schedule of the other filers in this thread to have the payment taken and receive the SMS. It seems likely that the missing $25 is causing the delay as we had certified delivery that USCIS definitely received our I-129F packet over a month ago now. Retrospectively it would have been far easier to just pay the extra $25 but we had no idea that the news about the fee changes being cancelled would come out just a couple of days before they were supposed to go into effect.