KESA

My husband's interview was also June 5th (maybe we saw you guys in line outside the consulate 😂) his visa was issued June 7th. Have you tried emailing them to check in? @AnaBanana12345 they didn't ask for our AOS documents - my husband brought an updated version to the interview (we applied to the NVC ages ago - so we had updated financial information by now, so our lawyers recommended we fill out a new AOS document and bring it just in case). But they never asked for a copy of the original or the new one we had filled out. We brought copies of both just in case though. For our interview: His appointment was 8am, we arrived in line at 7:20am and were 4th in line The windows opened at I think 7:45am and if you were applying for an immigrant visa, you were instructed to go to window #2 At this window they looked at the print out of his confirmation page from the embassy (the sheet that says if you elected to have the visa delivered vs. to pick it up) and his passport After that you move to the side and wait for the doors to open at 8am Once the doors open: they won't let you in until your phone is off and they won't let you in with any bag larger than an 'A4' size - so anyone with backpacks got asked to leave their bags outside the embassy (my husband gave his to me, the guy in front of us was alone - so he went across street where I think there was a storage facility or something -- it meant he was further back in line though so delayed him a bit) There was a lady with a tote bag that was let through, they just did a quick search but she was allowed to take it inside cameras, laptops or any larger electronic devices are also not allowed With all that, my husband was through the doors at 8:05am He handed his phone to security, who gave him a ticket to pick it back up when he left He then went to a counter where they gave him a ticket with his number/place in line to be interviewed That same person at that counter called his number and did his preliminary interview. For him, he says he only waited about 10 minutes between getting his ticket and getting called back up (he says people that came later had to wait longer since there were more people / a longer line by then) He handed her his passport She asked the following questions: name of his sponsor, is this your first or second marriage, do you have any kids, how many times have you entered the US, what was the duration of the longest stay, have you committed a crime She asked for the following (original) documents: marriage license, birth certificate, police clearance certificates, 1 photo The entire exchange lasted 5 minutes (some people that weren't prepared with all the correct documents took as long as 20 minutes for this interview) After that he went to sit back down and wait to be called for his secondary interview - this was the longest part. They didn't open the interview window until 9:30am, so he ended up waiting for about an 1hr-1:15hr to be called for this interview Once he was called for the second interview - this took about 5 minutes Very friendly - handed back all documents that the first interviewing officer had taken (the marriage license, birth certificate, etc.), excluding the police clearances, which she kept Questions: how did we meet, when did we get married, where did we get married, what do you do (career-wise), what is your wife's job / position She also asked to see my updated W2s (we had applied through the NVC back in early 2021, so we had two years of updated W2s that she wanted to see Because of the updated W2s - we showed her the physical copies, but she said they also needed to be uploaded to the CEAC portal before she could issue the visa. We uploaded immediately after the interview, when there had been no case status change by the following morning - we sent an email to support-poland@ustraveldocs.com asking if they had received the documents and checking on the status of our case. We did not receive a reply, but by the following morning (about 24 hours after we had sent the email, and 48 after the interview had taken place / we had uploaded the W2s) when we checked our CEAC case status it had changed to 'issued'. My husband received an email a few hours later saying that his documents had been 'collected from the US embassy' and when we double checked on the embassy portal website it said the passport was ready for pickup. We checked our case status at the following links: CEAC status link: https://ceac.state.gov/CEACStatTracker/Status.aspx?App=NIV Embassy Website: https://portal.ustraveldocs.com/SiteLogin?country=Poland&language=en_US

Hi All! For everyone that's had their interview: how far in advance did you guys schedule your medical / how quickly were your results ready? (@aerodnight @MCGH @IvanRi)

We got our interview letter today as well! Timeline below: DQ: March 17, 2022 Requested Embassy Transfer (from Nairobi to Warsaw): March 24, 2023 Embassy Transfer Approved / new Warsaw Case Number issued: March 27, 2023 IL Received: April 21, 2023 Interview: June 5, 2023 (We were both living / working in Kenya when we started our process so we initially applied through that embassy - the backlogs at the Nairobi embassy are so crazy, we waited for our interview letter from them for over 12 months before we gave up and requested an embassy transfer to Warsaw. Got the IL from the Warsaw embassy less than a month after requesting the transfer! 🤯)

No 😒 It was a pretty disappointing event. They really focused on USAID / security updates and then briefly touched on visas for like 60 seconds - they basically said 'immigrant visa processing increased x% in 2022, for those of you still waiting we appreciate your patience as we continue to work through the backlog' and then moved on. Super unhelpful, especially considering the statistic they cited was referring to all immigrant visas, which is up due to the increase in processing of DV and E3 visas. Meanwhile all IR and family based visa processing was actually down 4% in 2022 (I'm pulling the numbers from the monthly immigrant visa issuance statistics reports) - so they kind of dodged all of our questions, obviously a group of US Citizens asking about visas are asking about the visa categories related to them, not the DVs / employment visas 🙄

I registered yesterday! I'm asking if they have a plan to reduce the backlog for IR visas (my question below): "Hello - Can you please speak to the embassy's plan to reduce the backlog for Immediate Relatives of US Citizen visa interviews? Current wait times are well over a year. In January (the last month this data is available as of today) there were over 500 E3 visas processed, but only 49 IR visas processed (a 27% decrease from last month, and a 66% YoY decrease). The backlog and wait times for Immediate Relatives has been growing, while processing numbers for this visa class continues to decline. Is there a plan to process 1000+ Immediate Relative applications, like the embassy did for DV applicants back in September?" It's going to be at 4:30am US east coast time lol so should be an early morning. If anyone else wants to submit a question, it might increase the odds they actually address one of our questions if there's a few submissions on this topic!

I think when they put E3 they must mean all the employment third preference categories (E31, E32, etc.)? I thought they meant Australians at first too but that would just be so random 😂 But I still have no idea why they would process so many in that category last month? We were so pissed when we saw this yesterday. It's really hard to wait this long, but it's even worse to watch as they continue to prioritize other categories (that are LOWER priority categories than us!) and not care that the backlog for us just continues to grow... it's so infuriating.

Yes, exactly. Our two year anniversary was Dec'22 and our 'visa class' status on the CEAC page just auto-updated from CR1 to IR1 without us doing anything.

Good luck! We never tried the expedition request - so definitely curious to hear if that works 🤞 My plan is to just tweet them daily (either as comments to tweets on their page or just by tagging them in any relevant tweets/replies). I had an old account I hadn't used since 2016, so I just deleted any old posts and repurposed as an immigration account lol. It probably won't do anything, but I figure it can't hurt to at least leave a paper trail calling attention to how terrible slow they're moving. Also: I did see one tweet saying that the latest interview conducted were people DQ'ed Jan 4-6th 2022. If that's accurate, that would suggest the current backlog is ~13.5 months... I guess we'll see. If that's right, then @Eduh should be hearing within the next month?

let me know if you guys end up doing something! I've just started tweeting at the US Embassy in Nairobi and the US Ambassador to Kenya, hoping I can annoy and/or public shame them into picking up the pace lol (their handles are @USEmbassyKenya @USAmbKenya if anyone's interested in doing the same) ,

I think the DVs have a certain quota they can issue each year, but that quota expires / resets in October - so if they haven't processed all the applications by then, those slots are just lost. So they were so far behind that I think they started getting a lot of heat for it, so did a mad rush to process a bunch of applications before the quota reset in October. (This is what I've heard - I haven't really researched DV's very much so I'm not 100% 😂) But agreed - it's super frustrating to be 'top priority' in the visa class, yet watch other categories get prioritized over us. Especially since now that they've returned to 'normal' we're still seeing relatively low numbers in the 20s-30s, which doesn't exactly suggest that they feel the same urgency around this backlog as they did around the DVs... so depressing It's also so frustrating that there's no communication around their progress through the backlog - for example if I had known that the wait for this interview was going to be over 12 months, we would have started considering other options (for example, me looking for a job outside the US so we could live together). Being in limbo for 2+ years while we wait for this process to hopefully conclude sometime soon, is really hard. I always heard about how bad the US visa process was, but I guess I always assumed that was for more complicated cases or something. The fact that it's this hard to get your spouse a visa / legally in the country is really crazy

They processed 2 CR1s and 26 IR1s - so technically 28 spousal visas (I'm guessing with the size of the backlog the 2 CR1s they processed probably had reasons to expedite their cases and that's why they still qualify as the married for under 2-years CR1 category, while the rest of us have automatically converted to IR1 cases since it's been over 2 years since we started the process now lol). But considering the size of this backlog, it's still frustrating to see. Back in September when they were prioritizing diversity visas - they processed 1,034 DVs (and only 1 IR1, 0 CR1). So clearly they have the ability to prioritize a visa class and process high quantities. It'd be nice to see them do this for the family-based visa categories so they can at least make a dent in the backlog... the COVID closures were so long ago they can't keep blaming that for the fact that interview wait times are over a year. At this point, if they still can't handle the workload, shouldn't they just be hiring more staff to conduct interviews? It's all very frustrating.

This is really disheartening to hear. I had prepared myself for a worst case scenario wait of 12 months - but if you still haven't heard, that means the wait is definitely over 12 months... it's been 11 months for us, and I'm starting to lose hope. I wish they would provide some kind of communication around backlog / timeline so people could at least adjust their expectations accordingly.

Same here - we were DQ'ed March 17, 2022. Haven't heard anything yet 😕

March 17th

No, still haven't heard anything 😕