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ResourcesVisa & Immigration LawUS Immigration LawUSCIS Approved My K-3, CR-1, or IR-1 Petition, What Now?

USCIS Approved My K-3, CR-1, or IR-1 Petition, What Now?

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the post-approval if you will, after USCIS approval, what is going to happen in a K-3, CR-1 or IR-1 Visa process.

Well there are a lot of folks out there that look at the USCIS processing phase as the first half of the process. Not a good way to look at it under current circumstances. What we are currently seeing right now is the timelines for getting an interview and ultimately getting a Visa issued are dramatically longer than they have been in the past. Now from case to case, it is hard to figure where the length is going to be, like how much longer one case is going to be compared to another. It is hard to predict how long these cases are going to take to process through but it is not a real good idea to view USCIS approval as anything approaching any kind of finality in the case. The petition has been approved, it is moving forward, yeah you are processing a visa application but it is going to be a while. You are still going to be dealing with further aspects of the adjudication. A Consular Officer still has to do the interview on it and on top of that NVC especially in the context of CR-1 and IR-1 visas, in my opinion for lack of a better term, it can be something of a nightmare. It is a bureaucratic catch-22, feedback loop, black hole, quagmire however you want to look at it. It is a pretty difficult system to deal with and it is not really dealt with overnight. Oftentimes you will see them push back stuff, want to see a new document, want to see a clearer version of a document. That one really annoys me is when you send something that to my mind is clear as a bell but they want a clearer version. But NVC is not a real fast process to get through. In my personal opinion, only my opinion, the prior Administration did whatever they could to make NVC more obtuse in many ways and as a result we are dealing with a situation where after the USCIS process you have still got to deal with almost a redundant adjudication of redundant documentation submission process before you even get an interview date set and then you are going to be dealing with the interview and everything that that entails on the back end.

A note regarding K-3s specifically, they get through a little bit differently. They operate a little bit differently because they bypass the more onerous parts of NVC, especially with respect to processing of documentation. You don't have to deal with so much of that. However, and as we have gone over in a lot of videos, K-3s are oftentimes, and it has been my experience all of the time, are deemed to be Administratively Closed because the underlying CR-1 or IR-1 Visa petition which is processing through, goes ahead and it gets there contemporaneously or before the K-3 comes through. Where that's the case, the K-3 is effectively rendered irrelevant and closed. You just don't deal with it and now you are stuck with the CR-1 or the IR-1 and by stuck with I mean stuck with for purposes of dealing with NVC.

So the thing to take away from this video is, yes USCIS is a major mile marker in the overall Visa process but is it definitely not the end of the road.