FACTS:
A US Citizen sought assistance with filing for his wife who was residing overseas. This is usually a fairly straight-forward process which involves the US Citizen filing a Form I-130 Petition for Alien Relative on behalf of his/her foreign spouse. Unfortunately, wait times for I-130 Petitions are currently longer than you might expect. USCIS data shows that the average wait time for I-130 Petitions is creeping ever higher with 2019 numbers showing an average of more than 10.5 months!
Even after approval in the U.S. of the I-130 Petition, applicants must wait for US Department of State to process their cases through the National Visa Center (NVC). The chart below offers a basic overview of the I-130 Petition process.
THE LAW:
Although this is the traditional approach, USCIS does offer a little-used shortcut to bypass the longer wait times of the I-130 domestic processing. This process is known as concurrent filing. Where a single petition is coupled with another type of visa petition. In this case, a K-3 visa available only to married US Citizens filing on behalf of their foreign spouses.
THE RESULT:
For our US Citizen client, we elected to pursue a concurrent filing approach which has seen dramatic improvement in the wait times normally associated with the Form I-130. By filing some additional paperwork with USCIS, we were able to dramatically shorten the wait times and had his I-130 Petition approved in only four months.
By shortening the wait times for domestic processing, we were able to cut domestic processing times by MORE THAN 50% and achieve an “expedited” approval of this Form I-130 in less than half of the normal wait times (10.5 months).
While this approach will not always guarantee such speedy results, our office has had extremely good luck with this process and resulted in this case, resulted in a favorable outcome for our client.
DISCLAIMER: All Case Results published here depend on specific facts and legal issues unique to the case. It is impossible to guarantee any results.
