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ResourcesVisa & Immigration LawUS Immigration LawK-1 Visa to Green Card: Are Interview Requirements Causing Delay?

K-1 Visa to Green Card: Are Interview Requirements Causing Delay?

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the K-1 Fiancée visa as well as the process of adjusting that type of Visa into a Green Card or lawful permanent resident in the United States. 

In a recent blog posting in thinkimmigration.org, and it is quite an insightful blog posting,  I urge those who are watching this video to go ahead and read it because there is a lot more than just this topic, but the title of the blog posting is USCIS Acknowledges That its own Policies Compound Case Processing Delays posted by Jason Boyd,  April 30th, 2019.  Again, I urge viewers to check this out. There is a lot going on in this particular blog; very insightful stuff for those who are interested overall in US Immigration. 

But I just wanted to quote one thing specifically. Quoting directly: "As AILA has emphasized, the sweeping in-person interview requirements are not only delay inducing, they are unnecessary. Under prior agency policy, USCIS Officers had discretion to require in-person interviews on a case-by-case basis where for instance applications presented fraud or national security concerns. The current policy mandates interviews indiscriminately, sapping adjudicative resources that the agency could otherwise direct towards backlog reduction." Let me quote further, and from previously in the article. “This is critical. USCIS both expressly acknowledging that its policy changes have exacerbated processing delays and sharing data demonstrably exactly demonstrating exactly that." So a couple of things there. He goes in there to notice that USCIS has for lack of a better term admitted that certain of their policies are actually causing processing delays. Now that being said, it is not simply USCIS’s function to move these cases through as fast as possible. In fact they have an adjudicative function. They also have sort of a vetting function and a national security function in ascertaining whether or not somebody has an issue as noted in the quotations I cited from this article. Now what I think is interesting is interviews like for example in the K-1 Visa process, when one's fiancée is adjusting over from K-1 Visa status into Green Card status or Lawful Permanent Resident status, an interview can cause a delay. Therefore, if USCIS is requiring more and more interviews in adjustment proceedings, it stands to reason that cases are going to be delayed with respect to adjustment of status from K-1 over to Green Card. 

Now anecdotally, I have yet to hear anything or see anything in my own cases which would suggest that this is happening on a wide scale with respect to fiancée visas but that is not to say that my caseload represents a particularly great sample if you will with respect to K-1 adjustments, because frankly we are based over here in Bangkok and although we do assist in those cases, oftentimes we are mostly dealing with cases processed out of Bangkok and greater Southeast Asia. 

So the thing to take away from this video is just generally across-the-board, USCIS processing times are increasing and their policies whether obvious or sort of more covert if you will, with respect to requiring interviews, could have an impact on delaying the processing of an overall case. So for that reason it is probably a good idea to get cases filed early and often in order to get in the queue so as to process as fast as we can even if an interview is required you know you got to go ahead and get on file in order to get going to that interview. 

So the thing to take away from this is twofold. I think Yes they are probably there seems to be a trend with respect to delayed processing times and I think it is safe to say that if increased interview requests are issued, it could have an impact on the processing of K-1 Fiancée Visas over to full Green Card status.