Processing Delays

Hello everyone,

Next week will be a full six months since Jon and I filed our forms with the US government for our immigration petition. Having initially been told by our lawyers that it would take about three months for our approval notice, we got to about four months wondering what was going on. When we asked our lawyers earlier this year, we were told that cases are currently taking up to six months to process. So we waited some more.
As I said above, next week will have been a full six month since our application, and today we finally got a notification from the immigration services, "Form I-797C, Notice of Action", which explained that due to a large backlog, our case was being forwarded to another processing centre as not to be further delayed. In our case, our papers are being forwarded to Los Angeles. The processing at the Los Angeles centre should take no more than sixty days from the date of the notification (which is three days ago), and should we not hear anything we have a number to call and our lawyers will able to file a follow up query form. Hopefully it won't come to that!

There are multiple sides to this. I have so far been disappointed that it has taken such an extraordinarily long time, but having gone into this knowing that the US immigration services do not rush themselves, I had low expectations. I am annoyed slightly that we have to wait a further sixty days, but on the flip side this does mean that we are now guaranteed to hear sooner rather than later. Committing themselves to sixty days gives us a finite timeframe in which to expect our approval notice and move on to the next step of this ridiculously long process. Sixty minus the three days since the form was sent means we have a maximum of fifty seven left to wait for our approval. A fifty seven days I will be counting almost to the minute, no less.

Jon and I are actually just relieved to hear something, period, and be acknowledged, and know now that we haven't been lost in the system, and that someone somewhere is still working on our case.

We spoke to our lawyers today, once we got this notification, and they have informed us that they received a large volume of them at their office this morning. There had indeed been a lot of cases that had been waiting a long time, and the transferal of our case to another office should now speed things up greatly and we should hear soon.

Fingers crossed!

Have a great weekend everyone,

Dan.