Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing US Marriage Visas, specifically the K-3, CR-1 and IR-1 Visa categories so strictly speaking although the Immigrant Spouse Visa categories do pertain to spouses of both US citizens and Lawful Permanent Residents, we are kind of looking at this from the standpoint of American citizens with a Thai spouse processing out of the US Embassy here in Bangkok. The K-3 is exclusive to spouses of American citizens but I think the analysis is useful for many. 

I thought of making this video after recently I was watching a video by Mr. Jim Hacking another practitioner in the United States, quite honestly with a lot more broad experience than I have being kind of a one-trick pony dealing primarily with family-based immigration specifically out of Thailand. But he did put up a really good video, it was really informative about how they are currently saying that the underlying petition processing time for the petition associated with US Marriage based Visas or at least the underlying petition in all of the aforementioned categories, their estimated processing time is currently like 50 months which is crazy. Now as I have said in other videos, I have never really bought much into estimated processing times. They used to annoy me when they put up just unrealistically short processing times because I would get emails from clients that a day after X number of months had gone by, which in my opinion was too low, it was not a very accurate assessment at that time of how long the petition was taking to process, they would call me a day after the processing estimated date had gone by and say "well, what are we doing on this?" “Well not much. Those are estimates,” and I don't find this very useful on the short end or the long end, really. I just think it really just kind of causes consternation in the hearts and minds of the people that are going through this process. So on a certain level I view it is almost a little bit cruel to talk about this stuff as if it is like a hard and fast number, it's really not, it's really case dependent. Again, I have said it before and I will say it again, all these cases are unique, they have a kind of snowflake aspect to them. Now that stated, waiting around 50 months in my opinion is unreasonable and if you are getting even close to that, it's probably time to start looking at methodologies of mitigating or ameliorating that problem. 

That being said, I thought of making this video here, I was having to deal with something in my opinion another unreasonable matter in another case but I was dealing with the Ombudsman and I came upon this actually on the Ombudsman's website, the USCIS Ombudsman's website when I was doing a search, I came upon this, and this is on dhs.gov and it's under the subheading: Case Assistance Notice. Quoting directly: "Due to the unprecedented processing delays at USCIS and the resulting volume of case assistance requests we have been receiving, it is taking us longer to assist when the only issue is the case is outside processing times. We will still assist with these types of requests but it will take us some time before they are assigned to one of our Immigration Law analysts." My first question was, "What the heck is an Immigration Law analyst?" At the end of the day, you are either professionally trained in the law or you're not, so I don't know what that particularly means. But that said, they are just coming out and basically saying it, "look we're not prioritizing these requests, these sort of inquiries associated with a case falling outside of normal processing times," they are not saying they are not going to do anything about it, but they are definitely saying in my mind, this is not a priority to them.  Now, I have got all kinds of problems with the system as it is right now because quite honestly it's becoming quite a quagmire and I don't see any really good reason for it all things being equal, and any time you talk to anybody that's operating within that system it basically all you hear is Trump and COVID. And it's like well "neat" but we are sitting here getting into quarter 4 of 2023, that stuff is supposedly behind us now so what the heck are you talking about, especially when you are talking about 50 months, longer than a Presidential term of 48 months, 50 months of processing time associated with these types of petitions.

So hopefully we will see some turn around with respect to this and we will certainly keep you updated on this channel as that situation evolves.