EKT

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.

Our interview was yesterday and it went well. Now just waiting to get the passport back!

Welcome!! I emailed them too and got a similar response 😂😂 They must get that question a lot. I thought about ringing NVC but their main recording specifically says “we can’t predict when interviews will be scheduled” so I decided it probably wasn’t worth waiting an hour+ on hold!
 
Hopefully we both manage to score September interviews. Would love to be there by Thanksgiving if not earlier!

Hey, we just got one too for January 12th! I'm kind of glad Jeremy's isn't on the 5th as that's my birthday lol.... but YAAHHH, that timing should work pretty well for your guys, right? What a relief.

So sorry this is happening to you. Easily the most frustrating part of applying from NZ. When we got this RFE, I also emailed the consulate at AucklandIV@state.gov to confirm they received it and passed it on to NVC. Make sure you include your full name and case number when you email. Then I would call NVC (expect to wait on hold for ages) and stress that what you submitted the first time was correct and ask if they can flag it to be reviewed by a supervisor instead of going back to end of the line. Unfortunately whenever you upload new documents in CEAC, the most date becomes your place in line. Saying that, occasionally people just seem to get lucky and get a quick second review so fingers crossed that happens for you!
 
Edited to add: I just re-read your post. If you haven't already added/updated any documents in CEAC DON'T change anything until you call NVC due to the reason I mentioned above about the document review date. Call then first and see if they can re-check what you already supplied.

Good luck! I just re-read your earlier post. If you haven't already added/updated any documents in CEAC since the RFE DON'T change anything until you call NVC due to the reason I mentioned above about the document review date. Call them first and see if they can re-check what you already supplied.

Thanks. 
 
I have emailed the consulate - so I guess tomorrow I will begin harassing the NVC!

My husband just had his interview!!! Approved! Wooooo!
 
They asked him when we met, when we got married, what we do for work, what were his plans for work after arriving in the U.S. - all pretty basic stuff. They asked him why I didn't join him at the interview and he told them I'm flying back on Friday so have lots of packing to do and they thought that was understandable. Oh & they asked him about living in Germany as he lived there 2 years and asked if he had lived anywhere else overseas.
 
It's been 456 days since we first lodged our petition.... feeling lighter today  

Yah! That was super quick. You need to courier the documents up at least a week before so I would just send them now. Just make sure he keeps his passport for the medical and to get into the consulate on the day along with his interview letter. 
 
 

Yah! That was super quick. You need to courier the documents up at least a week before so I would just send them now. Just make sure he keeps his passport for the medical and to get into the consulate on the day along with his interview letter. 
 
 

It's all done online now and it only took 2 days for CityMed to upload the medical report to eMed when my husband had his interview in January. I think it's then assigned to a CO to review and attach the report to the applicant's case so I would leave at least a week's gap between medical and interview.
 
My husband only had his medical the day before the interview and it wasn't in the system at the time of interview, which we expected. He was told he was approved pending the medical report and his visa was delayed by about a week. Normally when an applicant is approved at the interview on Wednesday, the visa is issued and sent on Friday of the same week or early the next week. His visa was issued the following Friday (9 days after the interview) and arrived on Monday so he still had his passport and visa in under two weeks.

It's all done online now and it only took 2 days for CityMed to upload the medical report to eMed when my husband had his interview in January. I think it's then assigned to a CO to review and attach the report to the applicant's case so I would leave at least a week's gap between medical and interview.
 
My husband only had his medical the day before the interview and it wasn't in the system at the time of interview, which we expected. He was told he was approved pending the medical report and his visa was delayed by about a week. Normally when an applicant is approved at the interview on Wednesday, the visa is issued and sent on Friday of the same week or early the next week. His visa was issued the following Friday (9 days after the interview) and arrived on Monday so he still had his passport and visa in under two weeks.

Yip got my email for  my interview 13th April!!
 
Does anyone know what they do for medical tests? 

Got an email this morning. Interview scheduled for April 27!! Yay! 

That's actually extremely helpful, thank you so much!! I wanted to do some borderline obsessive research on the topic myself lol, but my brain just isn't up to it right now. I'm so burnt out on this process but thank [expletive] the end is near. April 20th would actually probably work out perfectly. My wife's contract at her job ends on the 30th, so that would probably coincide with her passport being returned with the visa. Then she can get straight on a flight!! 
 
That's super helpful, thanks again. 

Nice, congrats! The IR/CR is a little different as NVC schedules the interview and sends out a letter with the date but otherwise it’s the same with interviews always happening on Wednesdays. That sounds promising there are still spaces open! 
 
@ztiberiusd in the past NVC scheduled them late in the week of 20th of the month for a few weeks later. Fingers crossed you hear something later this week about a mid April interview🤞 

Nice, congrats! The IR/CR is a little different as NVC schedules the interview and sends out a letter with the date but otherwise it’s the same with interviews always happening on Wednesdays. That sounds promising there are still spaces open! 
 
@ztiberiusd in the past NVC scheduled them late in the week of 20th of the month for a few weeks later. Fingers crossed you hear something later this week about a mid April interview🤞 

wow thank you so much this just provided so much peace of mind! 

@BahamaBaby
Thank you and no, not at the moment. NVC rejected the NZ police certificate document that I had uploaded. Our case has been forwarded to a supervisor for further review. Hopefully, we will get an update in the next couple of days/weeks. Fingers crossed!! 
 
Not sure what's going on with the whole Sydney consulate situation. It is just shocking that they aren't scheduling any new visa interviews at all. Apparently, the rumour is that the new location where they are planning to relocate is not going to be ready until November this year. So who knows how long the wait is going to be. 🙄
 
Yes, thank god! we can now plan to travel to NZ after 27th Feb without MIQ. So once we get DQ'd by NVC, we will then request to transfer our case to Auckland and will take it from there. Good luck to you too and keep me posted! 🙂
 

@EKT that’s great to hear! Will just wait for the Auckland embassy to respond confirming they are fine and will go ahead and ask NVC to reassign the case there. 
 
Hopefully a quick process, we shall see! 

I think @mcs_2021 was DQ late December and had an interview last week. They don’t have a timeline so hopefully will post an update for those who are waiting on NVC.
 
I know the Auckland consulate did a few days of interviews in Dec and four days in January (always Wednesdays) for IR-1/CR-1 and K-1s. They seem to turn around visas the same week if approved at interview. 

@Ash23122 check out pages 13-15 of this thread. It looks like they asked the consulate to resend the police certificate to NVC and then the original document containing the email confirmation (which was previously rejected) was accepted in CEAC. Hopefully this will work for you! 

Ugh, sorry to hear you’re dealing with this.  It is a really common problem for NZ applicants unfortunately. There are quite a few posts about this earlier in the thread if you scroll back through, but it sounds like you’ve done everything right. Firstly, I wouldn’t upload anything new because it will have today’s date on it and potentially reset your processing time. I’ve also read many posts on VJ where the wait for a supervisor was a matter of days rather than the six weeks mention so maybe wait a week and call back to check in. @mcs_2021 what did you do in the end to resolve this?

I am also a kiwi living in Australia and we selected the Sydney embassy for the visa interview when we lodged our IR1 application in March last year. We submitted our documents on the CEAC portal back in Oct last year and currently waiting for them to accept our documents. 
 
Based on the other people posts here on VJ and Facebook, it appears the Sydney consulate is presently closed and has been scheduling immigrant visa appointments at the Melbourne consulate however, a lot of applicants who have already completed the NVC stage of their visa application process have still not heard any news on the visa appointments so it does seem like that they have got a bit of a backlog which could potentially cause delays. 
 
Unfortunately, no one has any clue when they will re-open the Sydney consulate and start scheduling visa interviews to clear the backlog which is quite bizarre - and because of this, we are also considering to transfer our case to Auckland consulate once we are done with NVC stage. Hopefully, by end of Feb or March, the NZ govt. will allow kiwis to return back to NZ.  (Fingers crossed) 
 
On transferring the visa application to Auckland - my understanding is that we will have to email the Auckland consulate first and get their confirmation if they are okay to accept our case or not and then based on that, book flights, accommodation, etc.  
 
 
 

Thanks everyone! We’re going to try our best to make this a one way journey but it really helps me mentally to know we have options if things start unravelling and the 6 month expiry is looming. So much pressure not to mess it up after all of the waiting and hoop jumping 😅