Transcript of the above video:

I know I have a number of cases going into what we call Consular Processing which is sort of the latter half of the K-1 Visa process which means you are going to be dealing with things like interview, medical exam, police clearances, stuff like that here at the US Embassy in Thailand. I know I have a number of those coming up when I get a round of questions regarding petition validity. 

So what are we talking about here? There is an underlying petition associated with a K-1 Visa. So an American citizen who is seeking to bring a fiancée into the United States needs to file a petition with the Department of Homeland Security, once approved, in order to then forward the case on to a US Embassy or Consulate abroad. The underlying petition has a validity period. Generally speaking it is going to be 4 months and I always get this question when people kind of transfer over and they are kind of looking at their case, they are looking at their case file, and they say “hey, it says here that this petition expires in 4 months. What does that mean?” And they are usually asking it in the context of "hey I want to get this Visa issued before the petition expires." I have done a number of videos on this in the past, do not fret on this topic. At the end of the day, Consular Officers have what is called pocket authority to go ahead and extend the validity of an underlying petition. And when a case is going through Consular Processing as a matter of course that is generally speaking, I have never seen it not happen, I guess in theory it could but I have never seen it not happen, if a case is processing, if it is in Consular Processing, it had an approved petition, generally speaking they will exercise their pocket authority to just re-extend the validity of the petition until such time as the visa is issued. 

So those folks out there who are looking at their K-1 case, they are looking at their approved petition and they are seeing that timeline, don't freak out. It doesn't mean that if you go over that time limit, somehow you are not going to get a Visa. At the end of the day, at least here in Bangkok, petition validity is extended on a regular basis.