Welcome to today's live immigration attorney chat. My name is Attorney
Desiree of Immigration for Couples. For those of you who are new to our firm and Facebook page,
our firm is dedicated exclusively to helping couples navigate the US immigration process.
We assist clients across the nation and across the world. We regularly host these Facebook lives
and you'll be seeing us more just like this one to provide you with important information and updates
in the world of immigration for couples. Today, I'm going to be discussing NVC wait times as well
as give a brief DACA update. The NVC wait times came up during my last live stream which was last
Friday and I saw it after I logged off so we're going to discuss that a little bit more today.
For those of you who are joining us live today, feel free to type your questions in the comments
section and I'll be happy to answer any questions after I go over the topics for today. If they
get too lengthy or too in-depth, it might be something that I take on as a whole separate live
broadcast. Just so you are aware, that's kind of where we're headed today.
Let's talk about NVC wait times and when we talk about NVC wait times, the NVC is short for the
National Visa Center. Let me back up for a bit here and tell you how do we even get to the NVC.
We start with, as far as immigration for couples purposes is, a petition to USCIS, and many times
that is an I-130 spouse visa or an I-129 fiancé visa. Once that petition is approved with USCIS,
then it can be forwarded on to the NVC for processing. Essentially, there are two types
of processing because we have two different case types. The first is going to be the fiancé visa
processing and right now, the NVC wait times are all posted on travel.state.gov.
That website is your friend and you can search up NVC wait times. It will come up with a whole
web page that will tell you what their case creation and what their case processing times
are. Essentially, how USCIS does this is they tell you, "Here's the date that we are currently
processing applications." For case creation, which would really be both visas, they'll give
you a date. Currently, it is August 17th of this year. They are currently creating cases
for those that they've received from USCIS from August 17th of this year. If you have
an approval of a USCIS petition that needs to go to NVC that is before that,
then you are right to submit an inquiry with them. You can do that from that same exact page that you
were on to figure out the wait times. It's called a public inquiry form and you do it all online.
You just have to have all of your information; petitioner beneficiary and all of your
information for the receipt notice and date of birth and that kind of thing. The second type
and the reason why the case creation is important for both the fiancé visa and the spousal visa,
for the fiancé visa that's literally all you're waiting on is for them to create the case and
then you will satisfy their application process and then it is forwarded on to the consulate for
interview and then you go on as the beneficiary for the client to schedule the interview yourself.
As far as the spousal visa is concerned, again the case is created with NVC but then there's a
second date that's important. The second date is the case review under the spousal visa.
You will also submit documents to the CEAC. After you submit or go through paying of the visa fees
on their website, and there are two different types of visa fees on their website, then you
also go through that application process as well and then you have to submit some documents.
There is a process by which CEAC will review those documents to make sure they meet
all of the standards and again that probably would be a topic all in and of itself to understanding
what documents they need and how to figure out if they're going to be available or okay with them.
Right now, the case review date is June 29th of this year. If you submitted all of your documents
and everything has been submitted and you hit submit on that CEAC website, it goes into a
queue for them to review. If you submitted before the June 29th date that they say that they are now
currently processing, then you can also submit a wait time for that as well or a public inquiry
for that to see if they can move that forward. If it was before that date, you might want to go in
and check and make sure you don't have any messages from CEAC because sometimes, they do
not accept a certain document or they want something additional or maybe you missed
a signature. They will comment on each document specifically and let you know what is needed. So,
that's the two types of wait times. Once the NVC has been able to review all of the documents
for a spousal visa and they have approved them, then you will become what's called documentarily
qualified. That is really what you're waiting on in order to get that moved to the consulate
to have an interview scheduled. A lot of times, they will notify you of that via email
that you've been documentarily qualified and then you're just waiting for that scheduling of an
interview again. Once you get to the scheduling of the interview portion and you are at the
consulate, you are kind of at the consulate's mercy on processing and how quick they get to
the interview. Some of them are very lengthy, as I kind of mentioned before, and some of them are
moving a lot quicker especially for certain types of visas. Hopefully, that was helpful. Also,
my second topic that I wanted to kind of briefly discuss is DACA. We have talked about DACA
numerous times and it's been in the news. There have been lots of changes and recently,
the law for DACA was codified. If you like this broadcast, please like our page,
follow our page, and maybe you can get some more information from us as well as sharing it
and we appreciate all of you. Thanks so much. Have a great day.