Dan and Akari's US Immigration Timeline
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Petitioner's Name: Daniel Beneficiary's Name: Akari VJ Member: Dan and Akari Country: Thailand Last Updated: 2024-03-31 |
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Immigration Checklist for Daniel & Akari:
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Timeline Comments: 1
Dan And Akari on 2024-03-29 said:Overview of our journey that will hopefully help others in similar situations.
We are not experts by any means nor are we advising others to do exactly what we did. This is what worked for us and we want to share.
Our original intention was to file a K-1 visa, have her immigrate to the United States, and get married shortly thereafter. Consequently, we organized and had a “celebration“ to celebrate our engagement with her family and friends in Myanmar before we embarked on this journey.
We hired an immigration attorney, who said he would help us file the K-1. We feel as though the attorney delayed the process of filing the K-1 because it took him almost 2 months to file. Finally in May, we filed the K-1, and at the end of the month I stumbled upon visa journey.
Immediately after our first post, we started receiving comments that we needed to rethink how we were filing. The consensus was our “ceremony“ would be construed as a wedding, and we could potentially wait 18 months for a K-1 visa only to be told by Immigration that they felt as though we were married and we needed to file CR-1 visa.
Obviously we didn’t want to have to wait 18 months only to re-file a CR-1 and wait another 18 months, so we made the decision in July to return to Myanmar, sign official marriage papers, and in August 2023 we filed CR1 online and received NOA1 the same day. The catch 22 here is that Immigration could’ve said they believe we were married and made us refile , but when we file the CR-1, one of the required documents is a signed marriage certificate.
After we fired the immigration attorney, we took it upon ourselves to do as much research as possible with the mindset that we want to be thorough and accurate over being speedy. We wanted to stay a step ahead in the process.
As part of this research, I felt as though filing a K3 as quickly as we could after filing the CR-1 would potentially expedite the process. Again, no empirical evidence that the K3 helps, but I felt as though it was my duty to exhaust all potential avenues to get my wife reunited with me as soon as possible.
I believe the research, diligence, and being thorough and accurate paid off because on January 25, just shy of our six month anniversary of filing the CR-1, we received notification from USCIS that our petition had been approved and had been forwarded to NVC.
The speed with which we were approved at USCIS caught us a bit of guard because the trend was showing approximately 11 to 12 months just to get the CR-1 adjudicated. My wife had to return to Myanmar to get a new police certificate, and go to the Thai police station in Bangkok to get a Thai police certificate. Additionally, I had to gather all the information to file my 2023 taxes, because we felt as though our interview would be after the tax deadline, and 2023 taxes would be required.
Unfortunately, all of this took time, especially receiving all the required supporting documents to file my 2023 taxes(I investment management company decided to send the 1099 – DIIV at the last minute in March).
We finally filed the affidavit of support and immigrant visa application with all supporting documents and paid the associated fees on March 11. I had questions regarding what supporting evidence needed to be included in addition to the required evidence. Consequently, I basically looked at the list of required documents she would need to take to her interview and uploaded all of those documents for her visa application and my affidavit of support.
On March 15 we received a notification from NVC that we were documentarily qualified. No dreaded RFEs. On March 28th we received the long anticipated email with her interview date of May 20th at the Bangkok embassy.
I will continue to post updates, but if all goes well at the interview we will have completed the process in approximately 9 1/2 months versus the 14 to 18 months we had originally anticipated.
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