|
|
| Rio de Janeiro, Brazil |  Review on May 22, 2016: |
NCMom
Rating:  | Review Topic: Direct Consular Filing
We were a different case. Because I had lived in Brazil for over 7 years with my husband and kids, we were approved to file DCF.
I flew to Rio to file the petition, they they handled everything there. After I filed the petition, it took just a few days to receive an email from them requesting the information they needed to schedule my husband's interview.
His interview was on a Thursday, so he flew to Rio on Monday and had his medical exam completed that afternoon. He personally picked up the results on Tuesday afternoon, and took them with him to his interview.
I did not go to Rio for his interview.
Of course Alex was very helpful and the first guy he talked to was helpful. The CO for the actual interview was a female and gave him a little bit of a hard time. My husband had lived in the US, legally, for 17 years before we went to Brazil, so he has over 40 qualifying quarters of paying into SSA. Because of that, he was exempt from needing a sponsor, and did not need any proof of financial support. We filed the exemption form (I-864W). Because it's not a common form, the CO gave him a really hard time about this and told him he must have a sponsor, but we had printed and highlighted all of the Immigration documents proving this. She talked with her superiors and came back telling him he was approved. :-)
He paid the fee, came home and got his passport in the mail a couple of weeks later. We all moved home (6 of us) a month later.
Because of our unique situation...he lived in the US for 17 years as an LPR. When we went to Brazil, he lost his LPR status after being gone 1 year (mistake on our part!), we've been married for almost 15 years, all of our kids were born in US, I lived in Brazil with him for those 7 1/2 years....I spent HOURS and more HOURS of research, and it was a post on this site that led to the final form we needed to print and highlight proving his exemption from having a sponsor.
All in all, it was a seemless process, with the exception of the amount of time spent researching to make sure we understood all of the nuances. We just did our due diligence to make sure we had everything we needed.
The process took us longer than it should have because I missed an email from the consulate that delayed us about 3 months. Had we not missed that, it would have taken 3 1/2 months from start to finish filing DCF.
| |
|
Consulate / USCIS Member Review #19572