JLVS22BR

Hi everyone! Just wanted to share with you that we arrived at the US today safe and sound. It took no longer than 10 minutes with the CBP officer - she opened the sealed envelopes, checked a couple documents, and asked some quick questions. Then she stamped our visas and said that we were good to go. I hope for you all that everything goes as smooth as it was for us!

@MrApa take a look at this.

There's a post about the Montreal Consulate here on VJ where users say there is a huge backlog over there. You might take a look before reaching a conclusion. I have the feeling that Rio is moving faster with the cases.

Hi @Damiores! I think that @RVS has given you the best possible answer sharing the DOS official link about vaccinations. Nevertheless, I'll translate and paste below the message sent by the doctor's office before our appointment. Vaccination (Age 18 – 60 years) - Covid 19: 2 full doses - Flu Shot - MMR - Hepatitis B - Tdpa/ Dtpa - Chickenpox/Varicella (if you had the disease, you don't need it) My wife also didn't have her immunization records anymore. We tried to reach out the public health services to look for it but they didn't have anything in their database. So we talked to the doctor's office in advance, and they recommended her to take all the required shots again so she could have the records. Those vaccines (except for chickenpox) are available at no cost here in Brazil (public health services), so by the time of our appointment she had all her immunization figured out (without needing to pay for it) and didn't have to take any other vaccine.

They were letting people considering the interview hour, so at the moment I was there everybody had their interviews between 7 and 8 am. I think there was something arround 10 applicants at that moment, but it's only a guess.

I tried to make conversation but people were so retracted that it just didn't work. But if I had to guess, everybody that morning was applying for an EB. Not only because of the "profile" of the people and families who were there, but I also have heard that consulates try to schedule the whole day for a single type of visa interviews since it makes more fluid the work of the staff.

Hi @RVS, yes we're going on the 21st of March! 🙌

Hi everyone! I really appreciate the kind words. Thanks for all the support along the way! Our immigration packages arrived yesterday, basically a week after our interview. I guess that if wasn't for the Carnaval holidays, it would have arrived by monday. Ever since I started reading about immigration I've heard about it, but to be honest I've never seen one before, so here goes! It's one big package, containing one sealed envelope for each visa holder, and a plastic bag containing the passports left at the consulate. There is a piece of paper attached to each envelope with information about the person to whom it belongs.

Hi @chrisbonatto, hi everyone! Sorry for taking this long to come back here and share with you in details how was our interview. I’ll do a brief recap for those who stop by and read this for the first time. I applied for an EB2-NIW on June 10th 2021. On June 17th I received the I-140 confirmation, and 6 months later in January 19th 2022 the petition was approved by USCIS. Texas Service Center processed my application, and unfortunately, I was one of the cases where the petition got stuck at the TSC and took an eternity to be forwarded to NVC. My attorney had to raise multiple services requests, and my case only moved forward after the Ombudsman intervention. Almost 6 months after approved, my case was forwarded to NVC on July 5th 2022, and on July 21st I received my welcome letter from NVC. I paid for the NVC taxes on that same day, and in the following week me and my wife filled our DS-260 forms. Since it’s a paper filled case, we had to send our documents through mail to NVC, which was done by my attorney in August 3rd. A couple weeks later, on August 18th, I received a checklist from NVC (aka RFE) regarding our birth certificates. It’s been only a couple years since birth certificates were standardized here in Brazil, and we guess that because of the differences between mine and my wife they asked for another one. We updated our documents and sent them again on August 25th. Then on September 19th I finally received from NVC the Documentary Qualified (aka DQ) e-mail. It took over 3 months to receive on December 29th the Interview Letter for an appointment at the Rio Consulate on February 15th 2023. We did our medical exams in Brasilia on January 18th and went to the ASC (aka CASV) in Rio on February 14th (just one day before the interview). We choose a hotel that was two blocks away from the Consulate (it’s called Windsor Asturias) and that proved to be the best choice that we could have done regarding where to stay. Since our interview was really early in the morning (7:20 a.m.) and it’s advised to be there at least 15 minutes before the scheduled time, we could start our day with no rush (we had breakfast, dressed up, and walked the two blocks with all the peace of mind). You can’t enter the consulate with any electronic devices, and staying that close from the consulate means that we didn’t have to ask for a uber or a cab, and more importantly we didn’t have to leave our cellphones with the keepers outside on the street (we just left them at the hotel). But now, let's get down to business! Interview day and at 6:50 (ish) a.m. we arrived at the consulate. There was a small line for non-immigrant visas, but the security guard asked us to stay there until someone from upstairs come down to let the immigrant visa applicants to come up. A lady came down, scanned the back of our passports (they put a sticker on them when you go to the ASC/CASV) and welcomed us in. We went through security and then were asked to take the stairs and go right to the immigrant visa section. When we got there, a young man handed out to us a form that asks some basic questions, like applicant/petitioner names, current and future addresses, case number, etc. He also handed out a paper listing which documents they needed and also in which order, and asked to put those documents accordingly inside each passport. At this moment we noticed that they were not strictly following the interview scheduled times, but were putting people in line based in the order that we handed back the documents. Since we were the first to complete this part, he put our documents and two different folders (one for each person), handed them back to us and asked for us to sit in the first couple chairs of the first row in the room, and said that as soon as someone called “next” on the booth we could go. After 15 minutes someone called us and we went to the booth. It was a Brazilian officer, not the consul yet, but certainly a higher ranked employee than the first one that just organized our documents in order. She had a cart behind hear full of cases, probably all the cases to be interviewed that day, but strangely my case wasn’t there. She spent a lot of time trying to find our case, but since she was not finding it, she asked a colleague to continue the search while she started with us only checking the data on her computer. She probably did that to not delay any longer, and a couple minutes later they brought my case to her. At this moment, she asked us to confirm our names, parents’ names, dobs, and finally she replaced the police and birth certificates in the process with the updated ones that we brought to the interview. The old ones (sent to NVC several months before) she just handed back to us. She was pretty straightforward all the time, but when answering about my parents’ names she made a small joke that lightened up the mood a little bit (I must confess that as calm as I was trying to be I was still a little nervous). She kept our passports and original certificates, and told us to wait for the Consul to call us. We went back to our chair, and probably 10 minutes later the consul called us. We were waiting for her to greet us so we could know if we had to answer in English or Portuguese. Oddly, she didn’t say hi or good morning, and went straight to ask us to take the oath (in Portuguese). After that, the first question that she made was which were my intentions on moving to the United States. Before I could finish my answer, she then asked me what was my field of expertise. After that, she asked if me or my wife ever had overstayed our time in the US. Then she also asked to both of us if we ever had problems with the police here or in the US. We answered a unison “no”, then she asked for us to read our fingerprints. Finally, she just said “visa approved”, and that was it! My wife thinks that she was kind of rude with us, but I just think that for some reason her day started off bad and she was short of patience, but nothing else. We had a great experience, and in less than two hours we were back to the Hotel, happier than ever and ready to enjoy a day at the wonderful beaches of Rio de Janeiro. Later in that same day, I checked the CEAC and saw that our visas were issued. On Friday (2 days later) I’ve received the e-mail with the tracking code saying that our passports were mailed back to us. I guess they will probably arrive tomorrow! We bought our tickets, and in this very same day a month from now we’ll be finally heading to the United States after this 3-year bumpy and thrilling immigration journey. As an anxious person, I know exactly how it feels this endless wait. There are so many things at stake. Me and my wife have been planning for this moment to arrive for years! We sold our house and our cars, we’ve been saving money like hell, and had to give up countless things in order to get as ready as possible. You give and give your best but the lack of updates makes hard to keep the hopes high throughout the time. But as my attorney always said to me: you must trust the process. Some people get their case figured out a couple months before, others a couple months later, but your day will come and all this distress will be left behind. If you guys have any questions, please let me know. I wish you all the best!

Hi @Surulere! We just had our interview and went great. It was really fast and pretty straightforward, in less than two hours we had everything figured out and our visa approved. They asked pretty much the same questions that they asked to you. Kudos for the Consulate staff, we had a great experience. Thanks for all the support throughout this process, it really helped us to keep positive! I'll let you know when our visa packet arrive.

Hi @chrisbonatto, thank you very much! We just had our interview and went great. It was really fast and pretty straightforward, in less than two hours we had everything figured out and our visa approved. I'll come back later to share more details with you! 🥳

Hi @crsbr and welcome to our support group! 😅 Hopefully in a month or two you'll be receiving your IL.

That's absolutely great @Surulere! Really happy for you and glad that everything went well. Hopefully in a couple days I'll also be able to share the good news with you. It's certainly been a bumpy journey, but it's so good to see the light at the end of the tunnel! I'm sure that the best is yet to come. Thank you very much for sharing with us your experience!

Hi @Surulere! Just two more days to go, right? Wishing you a great interview, I'm sure that everything will go 100% as planned. When you have the time, it will be awesome if you could share with us how it went. Best of luck! 🤞

@chrisbonatto this waiting time is really distressing, but I'm confident that your IL will arrive this month. I've been tracking interviews for the Rio Consulate here in the VJ for almost a year, and to be honest I can't remeber one that took longer than mine. So I hope that yours are about to arrive. As per I could observe (not a rule, just summing up the numbers), it's more common to see ILs by the end of the month. Yes, less than 10 days to go.. getting harder and harder to sleep, really anxious for this moment! 😂

At the appointment the doctor said that in less than a week they would send the results. She said that if I didn't hear from her anymore it would mean that everything was right. I'll send an email this week just to make sure that everything is in order. Well, if everything goes all right at the interview (no administrative processing), it probably would take about a week to get your passport back at the ASC/CASV. So, try to schedule your medical appointment at least a week before the interview to allow time to send the results in time to the consulate in case of any unforeseen circumstances. In my humble opinion, two weeks is a good timeframe if everything goes absolutely right. If something doesn't go as planned, it might take more time. I'd say that three weeks it's a more comfortable schedule.

Hi everyone! I did my medical examination last Wednesday at Brasilia. It was pretty straightforward: In the morning vaccination, blood tests, and an x-ray; in the afternoon, a quick talk with the doctor. Simple as that! One advice: make sure that your vaccinations are up-to-date. Most of them are available for free at public health services (i think that you have to pay only for the varicella shot if you never had the disease). If you get there and have to vaccinate, you'll have to pay - so get ahead and save this money. For instance, adults have to get the DTP vaccine every 10 years (you probably had took these shots when you were kid), and this is probably available for free at your city.

Yes, @chrisbonatto nailed it. Just send the documents of sessions 1 & 2.

I've also received a RFE (checklist) regarding one of the submitted civil documents. It took them approximately two weeks after receiving the documents (it's a paper petition so I had to mail everything) to get my case DQ. After that, 100 days to get the IL. By the end of december they were scheduling interviews for february, so I think that they keep doing well about the backlog. If you take a look at the latest Monthly Immigrant Visa Issuance Statistics (November), there were 49 IR1 visas issued at the Rio Consulate, keeping the trend from the month before (October were 50).

Thanks @sophie22! @CiEb2 regarding your question I'm an IT professional. 🙂

Thanks @ACC24! I'm an IT professional.

Yep @sophie, and I've read in different topics that "people heard" about embassies/consulates shifting their workforde do FB, since they were focused on EBs backlog right after the reopening. About the EB cases stuck at TSC after approval, sadly I was one of them! It almost took more time to my case reach the NVC than to be approved at the USCIS - it only moved forward after the Ombudsman intervention after way over 150 days of waiting. Regarding the way that documents must be submitted, as far as I'm concerned they have to be mailed when it's an EB case. The good part is that as strange as it seems they review it faster than when submitted electronically. Both times that I've sent documents (I got a checklist) it took them less than 2 weeks to review it. People that I was following by the time also experienced the same timeframe. As I write this message, I'm happy to share with you that I received the IL on december 29th and the interview will take place on february 15th. It took 101 days after DQ to get the IL, and there are 49 days between the day that the IL arrived and the date in which the Interview will take place. So, basically, it's 150 days between getting DQ and the Interview.

Thanks @chrisbonatto, I look forward to share the experience with all of you!

Yep, that's right! It took 101 days after DQ to get the IL, and there are 49 days between the day that the IL arrived and the date in which the Interview will take place. So, basically, it's 150 days between getting DQ and the Interview.

Awesome news @Surulere, really happy for you. I hope everything goes smoothly from now on. Although your email has arrived later, your interview will take place before mine! 🥳