Lancep

That's my point, spookyturtle -- all lawyers have to charge something in the range of $175 to $400 an hour to cover the office space, secretaries, paralegals, equipment, etc., etc. So even if you are paying $2K, you aren't going to get much attention. I'm a salaried government lawyer, so I don't charge my clients anything. But if I had been charging someone $200 an hour for all the work that I put into my fiancee's K-1, it would have been a $10K project. There is no way that any law firm would have put the effort into resolving the inevitable problems that I put into them. If people think a paralegal at a law firm is going to put that kind of effort into their K-1, they are kidding themselves. If everything goes smoothly, the K-1 is a simple project for which $2K or $3K to a lawyer is too much (in my opinion). But if you encounter snags, $2K or $3K isn't going to buy the kind of time that resolving the problems will require. Our petition went into a black hole at the CSC for about 3 months after it had supposedly been sent to the NVC, then my fiancee encountered problems getting a visa from Belarus to Poland and had to reschedule her interview. I probably put $5K to $6K of "lawyer time" into those two snags alone.

Weird -- don't know what happened, but what I was trying to say above was: At least in our case, we were notified by the interviewing embassy (Warsaw, Poland). I made contact with them immediately by e-mail when I received the notice from NVC that the petition had been sent to Warsaw. They notified me of the date and time by e-mail before my fiancee had received her notice, so I e-mailed my fiancee in Belarus immediately. Unfortunately, the first date was so quick that she wasn't able to get a Polish visa in time to make it, so they rescheduled it for 3 weeks later. I too was committed to attending the interview but was convinced by my fiancee and others that this would be nothing but a waste of $2,500. The interview turned out to be a Big Nothing, so I was indeed glad that I saved my money. I did fly to meet her at her entry point into the U.S., however.

Hi,

I recently received my NOA2 Approval. I was wondering when I would find out when the interview date will be? I know the next thing I will receive is the NVC, but when do they tell me when my interview is??? I am assuming my interview will be in about 60 days or so, but as I plan on flying to Chile to attend the interview and because I am anxious, I was just wondering when I would find out that information.

thanks,

Kristen

I think you can make yourself insane worrying about these sorts of things. My fiancee's "passport name" (from Belarus) does not exactly match the name on her Belarus birth certificate or her Belarus divorce certificate, but her K-1 sailed through with no questions. We just used her "passport name" (which happens to be the one with the most glaring errors!). I assume the U.S. authorities realize that errors creep in from time. Given the fact that these are bureaucrats processing hundreds of thousands of such applications, 98% of such discrepancies probably never even get noticed unless you make an issue of them.

I'm a very experienced attorney (25+ years) who used a non-attorney service ($465) for my fiancee's K-1 just for the comfort level of having someone with direct experience make the submission. They were helpful in responding to a number of my e-mails, but I'm sure they didn't spend more than a couple of hours on this project. They did nothing that I couldn't have easily done myself. When we hit snags in the process, I had to handle them myself -- and I know that I was a lot more persistent and thorough than any law firm would have been or could afford to be. If you are of average intelligence, you can easily do this yourself. And as one of the other posters said, you are going to end up doing most of it yourself even if you use a law firm. There is no way that this process is so complicated or legally intensive as to warrant spending $2K or more on an attorney. Nor is there anything an attorney can do for you that is going to give you an advantage over other filers. I had a similar experience filing radiation "downwinders" claims with the Department of Justice (the program that pays $50K to $100K if you have cancer and lived downwind of nuclear testing in the 1950s and 60s). There are numerous law firms that charge $5K to $10K for handling these things, and you still have to do 75% of the work yourself. I handled two of them for relatives with no problems in a couple of hours, which makes $5K to $10K seem pretty silly.

I have sent my fiance in Belarus at least $500 a month (sometimes $1000) since we met. I started by getting her an ATM card through I-Kobo, which worked great until I-Kobo stopped servicing Belarus due to U.S. sanctions. Then we switched to Western Union, which also works great but is considerably more expensive (I-Kobo was $20 or less to send $500, WU is more like $60). Just about every bank in Minsk is a WU agent. I have also left her with U.S. cash each time I've visited.

My fiance in Belarus is under the impression that she must bring her chest X-Ray from the medical exam to the U.S. The doctor told her to take the sealed envelope to the interview in Warsaw, but to bring the X-Ray to the U.S. Does anyone know what purpose this would serve, or whether she can leave it in Belarus?

For what it's worth, I got the notice today from NVC that my petition had been received and would be on its way to Warsaw within a week. I got no definitive answers as to why my petition took 70 days to get from CSC to NVC, but my sense was that CSC is less of a monolith than we might think -- meaning that it isn't just an assembly line that all petitions chug slowly down in single file. How long your petition takes will depend largely on which combination of desks/piles/pallets it happens to end up on/in. If the person who gets your petition is going on three weeks of vacation the day she gets your petition, you're going to lose three weeks right off the bat.

And the answers were?

The answers were that my petition wasn't lost when I feared it was lost, and that it had been mailed to the NVC the day before the DHS called me. I actually found everyone pretty responsive, as I look back on it -- 3 calls from the CSC, 1 call and 3 e-mails from the CIS Ombudsman, 1 call from the DHS, 1 call from the NVC, 1 call from my Senator's office and 4 calls from my Congressman's office. Since I work in a government office that processes merely thousands of files rather than hundreds of thousands or millions, it's probably fairly amazing that things go as smoothly as they do. Sorry not to sound as bitter as you might like, shawndoc.

I have to modify my above remarks: 5 minutes after I posted them, I got a telephone call from the Department of Homeland Security, providing the most detailed info that I have received to date. The guy said that my inquiries had been sent to him by the CIS Ombudsman. So they DID do their jobs and DID follow through even though it has been a "mere" 70 days since my petition was approved.

I must say, being a complete fanatic does have its rewards: I just got a call from the Department of Homeland Security in Washington that my approved petition went in the mail to the National Visa Center yesterday. The guy was extremely pleasant. So now I merely have to hope that it doesn't bog down within the walls of the NVC, or the Embassy in Warsaw, or wherever else it has the potential to bog down. (I don't want to suggest that being a fanatic got my petition treated any different than anyone else's. It didn't. But at least I got some answers.)

However, I can tell you from recent personal experience that unless you are MORE THAN 90 DAYS outside of what is considered the normal time frame for an action to be taken, you are not going to generate significant interest on the part of the Ombudsman. For example, the normal time frame for an approved 129F to get from the Service Center to the National Visa Center is "up to 90 days," even though that would be considered absurd and extreme to most of us. If you are not at 91 days, you are not going to get significant assistance and are going to get the party line that you are "within the normal processing time." They were perfectly pleasant, just not very helpful. In my quest to be the squeakiest wheel the USCIS had ever encountered, the one nut that I wasn't able to crack was the direct telephone line or personal e-mail of the Service Center Director -- that might actually do you some good, although nothing is ever going to move your petition ahead of its legitimate place in line.

I think that what is most maddening are the false expectations that are created. If someone had said to me, up front, "Look, it's going to take 2-3 months from the notice of approval by CSC for your petition to reach the NVC -- no more, no less," I would have had no problem with that. Granted, 2-3 months would seem a little ridiculous just to mail a petition from California to New Hampshire, but I could have lived with it. Instead, the reports of historical processing times and various "experts" led me to believe that anything more than 14 days from the CSC to the NVC was indicative of a MAJOR PROBLEM. So I came pretty much unglued after 30 days, and I feel pretty sure that everyone whom I frantically contacted was starting to view me as a bit of a nut case. I have calmed down considerably just by learning that at least my petition hasn't been lost. This is just a very difficult situation -- USCIS and the NVC are overwhelmed with work and are typical federal bureaucracies staffed by unmotivated, semi-trained gerbils who don't appreciate that each petition is the most important thing in the lives of two real people ... those of us who have filed petitions are living on the raw edge of our emotions and are ready to come unglued at the slightest hint that our petitions aren't moving as quickly as the best-case scenario we've ever read about ... and there is a lot of information out there, some good and some bad, that either creates false expectations or ungrounded fears. So after completely exhausting myself over this for the past two months, I'm going to chill out and just let the silly thing work its way through the system.

Thanks again, djaedi. Actually, this whole thing started because I went to Belarus in early March. I was hoping that the NVC would have my petition before I left, and I was going to make contact with the embassey in Warsaw (both by e-mail and in person, since I went through Warsaw). However, the NVC didn't have it before I left ... and, of course, they still don't have it. While I was in Belarus, we did go through the checklist of everything the embassy will need, and we took care of everything except the police certificate (which you can't get in Belarus until you have something from the embassy) and the medical exam. I also left my fiance a large binder of the materials that the embassy will need from me. So I think we're in pretty good shape. The minute I know that the NVC has assigned a number to the petition, I am going to contact the embassy by e-mail and see what I can do to speed up the process. I do sympathize with the CSC and the NVC, because the workload must be incredible. I work in a county attorney's office with a few thousand files, and we are always scrambling to locate lost files. It's the typical American system -- the most critical jobs are filled by the lowest-paid, most poorly trained employees, so screw-ups are inevitable.

See my recent thread about the black hole between CSC and NVC. I was approved on Feb. 4. I had a very productive call with a representative from the CSC yesterday, and she said that it is indeed not uncommon at the moment for there to be a delay of 1 to 2 months from approval until receipt at the NVC.

Well, I finally got a meaningful call from the CSC after calling the emergency line once again. The woman was extremely nice and said that my file is indeed still there. She said that I am the most persistent human being she has ever seen (hey, I'm an attorney!) and that I have attacked this from so many angles that the file has bounced all over the place during the past few weeks as they try to respond to all of the inquiries. But she did say it is approved and that she is sending an e-mail that it must go to the NVC ASAP. She had a convoluted explanation as to why it is still there – things get shuffled to the wrong officer’s desk, what is called the CSC is not all one building, things get put into the wrong crate for shipping, etc., etc. She did say that this problem is not all that unusual, and my Congressman's office said they have heard the same thing about multiple inquiries actually causing delays. It appears to me that whatever I’ve managed to accomplish with this has been done on my own – I don’t think my Congressman efforts carried near as much weight as me bugging the CIS Ombudsman to death, calling the Director of the NVC, and leaving repeated messages on the CSC emergency line.

djaedi, I did contact the embassy in Warsaw but have not heard back. My best guess is that it's still at the CSC. I suspect that Untrained Gerbil #1 approved it on Februray 4 and sent it to Untrained Gerbil #2 for final processing and mailing, whereupon Untrained Gerbil #2 saw the erroneous Oct. 31 receipt date and put it in the wrong pile. But who knows? Maybe Untrained Gerbil #2 took to it to the bathroom to read on the toilet, accidentally peed on it, and flushed it rather than admit his mistake. I'll post a final update if and when this mystery is solved. What is disappointing is the inability of the CIS Ombudsman or a Congressman to simply get a straight answer like "It's sitting on the desk of Untrained Gerbil #2 in Room 224 at the CSC and will be going in the mail to the NVC next Monday." Instead, even they get the standard party loine of "It can take 90 days," which simply means "We have no idea where it is and aren't going to start looking until it's been lost for at least 90 days." They seem to have no appreciation of the fact that these petitions represent REAL PEOPLE to whom snafus like this are devastating.

WOE UNTO YOU if you ever get caught in a snafu like this. I was just told by the all-knowing CIS Ombudsman that: (1) My petition was received on October 31. WRONG. It was received on September 7, as stated on both the notice of receipt and the notice of approval. The October 31 date appears only on the USCIS website. I immediately called about this error when I got the notice of receipt and was told not to worry about it because the official notice was correct. (2) The CSC is now working on petitions received on September 9. WRONG. This is the "party line" stated on the USCIS website, but it is off by about two months. (3) I was told on March 27 that my petition was still at the CSC. WRONG. Both I and my Congressman have repeatedly been told that my petition was sent to the NVC shortly after approval on February 4. A puzzled caller from the CSC told me on March 27 that "it appeared" from her screen that my petition "might" still be at the CSC, and she would "try to locate" it and call me back in a day or two (which, of course, she didn't). (5) My petition is still well within normal processing times. WRONG. It has been 63 days since the notice of approval. The all-knowing CIS Ombudsman didn't appear to see any incrongruity in telling me that my petition was received on October 31, the CSC is now working on petitions received on September 9, and my petition was approved on February 4. What an amazingly incompetent system.

Of course, in 60 days it could have gone from the CSC to the NVC by Pony Express.

No, CBR, there is no confusion. I'm an attorney, as I said in my original post, and have been in direct personal contact with the Director of the NVC and the CIS Ombudsman. The K1 petition was filed 9-7-07. The NOA2 was issued 2-4-08, so today is the 59th day since approval. Unless a Congressman or Senator can apply pressure, which mine are trying to do, no one at USCIS or the NVC will show any interest unless it's been more than 90 days.

Just for example, a fairly high official at the NVC told me that it's quite common for the Service Centers to send erroneous approval notices -- so you think your petition has been approved on December 15 and should be at the NVC by January 1, when in fact on January 5 it's still sitting in a pile at the Service Center. My Congressman's office also had numerous horror stories in which they have been involved, most of which ended with the petition appearing at the last minute. The problem is that no one wants to spend 15 minutes on the problem until it's been at least 90 days.