prowler101

My FINAL timeline: Paid Immigrant Fee: October 30, 2021 POE: ORD(Chicago) - November 9, 2021 Received SSN: November 23, 2021 (14 days after arrival. Applied for SSN in DS-260 form) ... ... ... long time waiting and making a lot of requests... ... ... GC is being produced - July 18, 2022 GC mailed - July 21, 2022 I RECEIVED GC IN MY MAILBOX - JULY 22, 2022 In total: 256 days! (8,5 months) The main reason of the delay: The border officer in the airport made a mistake and did not take my 'Immigrant Visa Packet' (sealed packet with my photos+scans of documents). According to the procedure, the border officer must take the 'IV packet' and then "US Customs and Border Protection" must mail this "packet" to the USCIS. By the way, I know that sometimes people can have annotations on their visas that "all documents were processed electronically". In that case they don't need to provide the "IV Packet" to the border officer, but I didn't have that annotation in my Visa... In my case, I gave my packet to the border officer. He opened the packet, checked what was inside, and then... returned the packet to me and told me that I can go and everything is OK... After that I had next timeline: 1) No GC after 90 days - I made my 1st request. Response from the USCIS: "We need additional time to find out the reason of delay, please wait 30 more days..." 2) No GC after 120 days - I made 2nd request. Response from the USCIS: "We have not received your Visa Packet, you must make an appointment to the local USCIS office and re-submit all your documentation and photos" 3) I Made 1st request for getting an appointment in local USCIS office... Response from USCIS after some time: The appointment was not approved, because the reason is not urgent, please make another request for an appointment" 4) I made 2nd request for getting an appointment... The same response from USCIS: "No appointment because the reason is not urgent" 5) I Made my 3rd request for an appointment with notice that 2 previous requests were unsuccessful... after that finally USCIS called me back and scheduled an appointment for me! 6) JUNE 8, 2022 - Appointment in local USCIS office in Chicago. Submitted my "IV Packet"... Also the representative told me that now the process should go from the very beginning - the same way as I just arrived to the USA. This means that now I need to wait 90-120 days from June 8, 2022(date of submitting of packet). I was shocked and I asked if maybe there is a way to speed up this process, because I've already been waiting for so long... Thankfully, the representative was a very nice and helpful person. He promised that he will try to check if there is a possibility to speed up the proccess. 7) July 22, 2022 - received my GC. So it took 45 days from the submitting of packet in the USCIS office. and 256 days in total.

Hi shoshk I called by the phone 800-375-5283 There is autoresponder and I told that I need appointment and then I was connected to live representative I told to the representative that I made 3 requests for appointment without any success, and asked to escalate it because otherwise it will be absolutely unfair to wait any longer... so he agreed with me on that and marked it as an "emergency". I don't think he can do that if you make your first or second request... I think they can do that only after three or more unsuccesfull requests or so.

Hello everyone, I want to share my story about how long I've been waiting for GC... So, I paid an immigrant visa fee on 30th October 2021 Then I arrived in USA on 9th November 2021 I was informed that I must receive my GC within 90 days of my entry. I hoped that within 90 days I will receive my GC, but after 90 days I received nothing... I submitted a request about 'outside of normal processing time' and after about 30 days they responded to my request, but without any specific information about the delay... In the response, there was like "We need some additional time for processing your case..." After that, I submitted another request and after a few weeks, they finally responded with information that my case is blocked because they "Did not receive Immigrant Visa Packet IV"... and I need to make an appointment to the local USCIS office and submit it in there. So, I found out that the reason of all that delay was that the border officer at the airport made a mistake and returned Visa packet IV to me... HE SHOULD HAVE SENT it to the USCIS but he did not...! My advice to all who will come to the USA soon for the GC.. ALWAYS ASK border officer about this Visa Packet IV. Make him double-check it if he needs to collect it or not! Otherwise, you may have a very big delay if he just returns this packet to you! Now the second part of the story! After I knew what's the problem I made a request for an appointment in the local USCIS office (in my case it's Chicago). The USCIS has 30-days term for providing an answer on the request for appointment. Within this period they must call you and set up an appointment for you. So, after a 2 or 3 weeks, the representative called me by phone and told me: "No available appointments at the moment" and I need to make another request for an appointment... I submitted a second request for an appointment, but after 3 weeks the situation was the same!! The Representative called me on the phone and instead of setting up an appointment to me he just told that "No available appointments at the moment"... After that, I made a third request and told them that I already made 2 requests so I really need this and I was assured by the representative that this time "I will finally get an appointment - I just need to wait when they will call me back within 30 days"... I waited for another 30 days... but this time nobody even called me back...!!! 😨 So, after that I called them again, and on 4th time they finally escalated this to an "emergency" situation because of too many requests that I made, and on the next day, the representative called me on the phone and finally set an appointment on 8 June 2022 for me. So, it took me more than 2 months just to get to the local USCIS office... And now the worst thing among all this.. Today in the morning I was in the local USCIS office and submitted the "Immigrant Visa Packet IV". The representative told me that they will not process this packet in the local office - they will just mail it to the main office and the main office will deal with it. Then I asked the representative when will I finally receive the GC as I finally provided this packet to them? He told me that I may receive GC... from 6 to 9 months since today!!! I told him that I had already been waiting for more than 200 days, but he told me that all that previous time that I waited doesn't matter! The process will start only when USCIS will receive this packet.. So, I asked him why 6-9 months?? Why not 90 days..?. He told me that "90 days" range is no longer available, and now the processing time for this is 6-9 MONTHS!!! And if by that time my temporary Visa stamp will be over I need to set up another apointment to extend my temporary visa... Now it's only 5 month left until it will be expired... and I know how bad is experience of setting up an appointment to them... I'm literally shocked at the moment... So, I'm on my 212 day now, and as I understand I still need to wait 6-9 months more... I'm absolutely upset and disappointed...