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How Long Do K-1 Visa Interviews Last?

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing K-1 Fiancé Visas. A question that often comes up, I hear people ask me: "How long do K-1 Visa interviews last?" Well the short answer to that is "It always depends."  

I am going to quote an article here that I found rather interesting recently but understand every case is different. Just because things work a certain way 80% of the time, that 20% can be radically different. Frankly 80% of the cases that I deal with that folks contact us, retain us to deal with, they do move in something of a predictable manner. There is another 20% and some of them we can label as non-routine from the outset and others of them look just like any other case on the intake and just something happens in the middle of the process or for instance it gets to interview and you just get an Officer who wants to get more in depth or you may have an issue where they view that maybe the Fraud Prevention Unit needs to be called in for their two cents on the issue. Then you are dealing with the Fraud Prevention Unit interview or something akin to a so-called Stokes interview at the interview phase. Now again, oftentimes cases move in a pretty predictable manner but not always. I sometimes tell clients, it is not for the 80% that folks are generally contacting an Immigration Attorney to process a Visa case through. It is for the off chance that they end up in the 20% and they need somebody who has dealt with those things that they generally are looking for somebody to assist. 

A recent article from Foreign Policy, we will go ahead and put this up on screen, it is Foreign Policy Magazine, foreignpolicy.com, the article is titled: The State Department's Visa Issuing Authority Is in Crisis. I thought this was a pretty good, it was a tiny little excerpt from a large article. Quoting directly: "It is a rushed system: A standard Visa interview may be 5 minutes or less conducted through bulletproof glass often in a language other than English." Yeah, I mean that is not entirely incorrect, that can be how things go but it might not be. Especially in a K-1 context, there are elements of wanting to ensure that there is a genuine relationship so issues like language fluency can be an issue. It depends on circumstances but Thai may not be the operative language people are using when discussing things in a K-1 Visa interview. 

Long story short, again there are routine cases and there are non-routine cases. Generally speaking, it is not readily apparent at the outset of one of these cases that it is going to just sail through or it is going to have problems. Sometimes an otherwise in my opinion, perfectly processable in my opinion routine case, can end up having all kinds of issues including an interview.