Nuba

A bit of encouraging news. First approvals from early Sep are being reported.

As things are going with USCIS, we will be lucky to see Feb.

Sorry to report that reported processing time has just changed to 15 months.

Beginning of month update from fellow Nov filer and data dude. First the bad news. According to VJ self-reported data and scans of USCIS site by individual members, over October the delay in processing I129F has slipped to 14.5 months. This is not yet being reported on the USCIS processing time site but don't be surprised to see it shortly unless things pick up.. In Mar USCIS announced their intent to reduce I129F processing time to 6 months over the fiscal year that started in Oct. The final tallies aren't in yet but there are some indications that I129F processing did pick up in Oct. The outstanding cases for months prior to Jul have been whittled down and Jul doesn't have all that far to go. There are some signs that the abnormally high rate of RFEs we saw over the summer is abating. These trends, if accurate, would free more resources to work on the current processing month, which is August. And indeed we did see a surge in late Aug cases processed in the last week or so. I've been fooled before but I am hoping to see the delay stop increasing in the next few weeks. TL;DR: Next key indicator is when they start processing Sep which I don't expect before mid Nov but hope springs eternal.

Here is the official announcement from USCIS https://www.uscis.gov/venezuela At this link under The Process : Note: The beneficiary must have a valid, unexpired passport. Certified extensions of passport validity serve to meet this requirement. If a beneficiary's passport validity has been extended, the expiration date of the extension should be reflected as the passport expiration date. CBP will not authorize travel if the beneficiary's passport or extension is expired.

As i reported above the data continue to show the posted date of 14 months continues to slip closer to 14.5 . One good trend we are seeing in recent scan data is the percentage of RFEs has dropped significantly from the historically atypical high numbers of the summer. This will mean less revisiting of petitions and thus more time for new ones. At this point to bring that number down in the next year USCIS will need to assign a lot more adjudicators to I129F or the existing ones will need to become a lot more more efficient. This is true even if there were no new I129F petitions after today given the current backlog

Thanks for the update. Another good Tu after a low Mon. Seems Tu has replaced Mon as the big day of the week. One encouraging thing is the percentage of RFEs has dropped considerably from the spikes in the summer. Maybe the new trainees are getting a little less trigger happy. 😀

I am a Nov 2021 filer who is also a data dude. When I filed, the estimate was 6-8 months so I share your pain. I have been monitoring both internally reported VJ data and data independently scanned from the USCIS site since the announcement in Mar. You are right. The processing time has continued to slip. In fact, current data show that the actual processing delay is just shy of 14.5 months. There has been a gradual trend up in the number of weekly cases processed but not enough to reverse the slide. The hope some of us had was that after fiscal year end, resources might be shifted from visas that had yearly quotas to K1 and CR1 starting Oct 1 . It is still too early to notice a definitive shift but there have been a couple of days with a large number of processed cases reported; these might be a reporting anomaly since the day before was unusually low. They seem to be closing outstanding cases from previous months much faster than before. It is also encouraging that they started processing Aug well before Jul untouched cases had approached 500 which seemed to be the trigger previously for moving to next month. Interesting that they are processing across many data ranges in Aug, which would indicate they have distributed the work across many adjudicators in parallel. Cases are definitely not processed in strict numerical order as some folks seem to think is or should be the case. Don't know if this gives you hope but perhaps it provides a little transparency which USCUS seems to abhor. Shifting to your initial topic, my fiancé and I are also a same sex couple. We actually could get married in his home country but chose to do it in Hawaii (we're romantic). There is one option that I learned about after I filed for K1: the Utah online marriage. During the pandemic Utah and a few other states permitted on line marriages. Of these, Utah continues to offer the service and since same sex marriage is recognized at the federal level, Utah support it in their online marriages. (Yes Utah!). You and your partner can each be in any location, inside or outside the US and even in separate countries. This is a legitimate marriage (marriage by proxy...I asked my lawyer) recognized by many governmental agencies, including the IRS so mind your taxes. The one catch is that for it to be recognized by USCIS you and your fiancé must meet once AFTER the wedding to consummate it, as opposed to meeting once BEFORE applying for the K1. Consummate in this context just means any in-person meeting, not in the biblical sense (It has been asked...on-line sex doesn't count for this purpose). If our K1 visa is denied for any reason, we will do this and immediately apply for CR1 since by then we will have been together more than 10 times.

I am a Nov 21 K1 filer, Thanks for the concise summary.

You can see VJ self reported stats for EAD here https://www.visajourney.com/timeline/eadstats.php?cfl= And AOS stats here https://www.visajourney.com/timeline/aosstats.php?cfl=

I'd like to think so too. But since it is such an outlier, I suspect it represents many from Tu that were entered on Wed. In any case, it was nice to see.

Not quite. From https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/AnnualReports/FY2021AnnualReport/FY21_ TableXVB.pdf 2017. 2018. 2019. 2020. 2021 K3 Certain spouse of U.S. citizen 15 6 5 2 2

True but this is tempered by the Tu just before. If you average the two days it is good but not so spectacular. Hope springs eternal...

Dang. As a Nov filer i got excited that a Sep was approved. 😁

I don't claim to be an expert although this is my second time through the K1 process (long story). Yes, the I-134 is completed after the NOA2 and will be included in the packet you submit to the embassy for your interview. There is an excellent guide to the K-1 process here on VJ that covers this and many other points. The associated K1 flowchart is also very clear. I encourage you to read through them to know what's coming when we finally get past NOA2. Hope this helps.

Did you meAn NOA1 08/02/21?

Quick update from a data dude. There is no indication yet of any speed up with the start of the new fiscal year Oct 1. The self reported time in VJ show the delay is inching closer to 14.5 months. Moreover, apparently due to overzealous code jockeys running many scans, it seems that USCIS has made changes to their web site so that the scanning scripts no longer work. Hard to blame them since this was probably overloading their servers. OTOH they could run the same scripts themselves nightly and post the results but transparency to the people who actually pay their salaries with our fees isn't on the menu. Unless something changes we should expect to see the reported processing time change to 14.5 months by early Nov. For reference, when I filed last Nov the reported time was 6-8 months. Since then the processing time has consistently increased by .5 month every month on average. If this continues we will be lucky to be processed in Feb .

Nov filer here. The published processing times are backward looking,. If in each of the next three months they close more petitions that are waiting to be processed in the "current" month we could see the slippage slow down and actually start to decrease. To oversimplify by ignoring the sill untouched petitions from July and previous months, they just started processing August. If this month Oct they close more petitions than are outstanding for August; and In Nov they close more for Sep; and in Dec they process more for Oct....then we will see the published time decrease by end of year. Can they do it? Sure, if they put a lot more resource on I129F. Will they? I wouldn't bet my lunch on it. But the processing numbers from last Fri and yesterday are the first bit of encouragement in nearly a year of looking at data.

At least in the Colombia embassy, you first pass by someone who gives you a card with exactly the order they want and then checks it. Of course this may vary by location, so best to follow the order in your embassy packet and see if you can find someone who recently went thru yours..

We Nov filers are rooting for you Aug folks to be finished quickly.😃

For daily updates, see the scans of USCIS processing in the July and August subforms adjacent to this one. These are performed programmatically by VJ members using custom scripts. Would bet we know USCIS progress better than USCIS itself To see the dates currently being processed based on VJ self reported data, look for K1 items on the Timelines page. This is consistent with the daily scan data, which is not limited to VJ members. https://www.visajourney.com/timeline/ Hope this helps.

Monthly update from Nov filer data dude. September was another dismal month for I129F as USCIS raised their reported time to 14 months and the actual data already show more like 14 months plus a week. Oct 1 marks the start of the new fiscal year for USCIS. Some of us are hoping USCIS will redeploy resources to fiance and spousal visas now to meet their aggressive target of 6 months backlog by end of FY23. For the eternal optimists among us, there was a tiny glimmer of hope in Friday's reported processing data. There was an atypically strong (for Friday) number of processed cases for June and July. Even better, we saw the first processing for August. Granted a single data point proves nothing and all the Aug were RFE, but anything positive is welcome by now.

The USCIS web page says "This processing time is based on how long it took us to complete 80% of adjudicated cases over the past six months. Each case is unique, and some cases may take longer than others." In other words this is a backward looking measure of actual processing time over the last 6 months. People have constructed any number of conspiracy theories but the simplest explanation is that this number it is just what the data show. It does not in itself imply anything about the processing time for later petitions. Today is the beginning of fiscal year 2023 for USCIS and some of us are hoping that starting this month they will redeploy resources necessary to meet their aggressive targets in backlog for fiance and spousal visas by end of FY 23. If not, the backlog will only grow as new cases continue to exceed the number of cases processed.

Realistically we Nov filers are at Jan or even Feb for I129F approval and then at least another two months to get to your local consulate. Once at the consulate the interview schedules vary greatly by location from a month to 6 months or more. So unless USCiS and NVC make drastic improvements soon we are looking at Mar best case for consulate receiving approved I129F and Apr best case for interview and then fiancé(e) to arrive in US.; Summer is likely for many I am fortunate that I can visit my fiancé so we a racking up evidence of time together for the interview. We chat every day on WhatsApp and talk frequently. I’m getting better in Spanish and he is starting to learn English. In anticipation of his coming here he took driving lessons and got his drivers license. I show him video of New York and explain how things work here. We Exchange videos of my cats and his dog. I show him photos of the house he will live in and take him on virtual walks in the hood. The wait is excruciating but honestly it has enabled us to know each other better and work out things that could have been explosive in the first 90 days together.We are about as opposite as two people can be and we are learning to accommodate and appreciate the differences. Hope this helps

It’s not a big deal but it would make the VJ stats a bit more accurate