This Could Take a While (Volume and Trend Charts for Form I-129F)

By Victoria

Colin and I were doing some research on USCIS's website the other day and found an interesting area where you can look at charts regarding the intake volume and processing times of any USCIS field office in the U.S. It is, unfortunately, a little bit bleak in terms of how quickly ours might be processed...

To find the information regarding Form I-129F (which is what we submitted), you can go to http://dashboard.uscis.gov/ and enter the following information in the drop-down fields:

1. Form Type: I-129F
2. Office: Dallas Field Office
3. Chart Type: Pick either one

Trend: The top trend chart shows values for USCIS nationally, and the bottom chart shows the Dallas office's trends for each month over the past year. The top chart is scary looking, but it's national, so that makes sense...Dallas has much more manageable numbers. But still, you'll notice the "pending" values are much higher than any of the other values. As I suspected, they definitely have a backlog to get through.

Volume: The volume chart shows only a couple of months ago (March 2014); the top one is national volume, and the bottom one is volume for just the Dallas office. Again, that national one is really intimidating. The second one has much more relevant information: the Dallas office had 12 total I-129F forms pending as of March, with only 1 making it all the way through to completion in March. If that's the rate of completion, it doesn't look like the completion time for ours will be coming up very soon...we're probably at least #15 in the queue, since we submitted in May.

Average Processing Time: The most definitive bit of disheartening information comes from our discovery of the average processing time for I-129F forms that go through Texas. To see this one, go to https://egov.uscis.gov/cris/Dashboard/CaseStatus.do and enter the following information in the drop-down fields:

1. Form Type: I-129F
2. Form Sub-Type: K-1/K-2
3. Texas Service Center

You'll see that the average processing time for Texas Service Center is 5 months. Keep in mind, getting approved by the Dallas office is only STEP 1 of this whole process. After Texas, it still has to go through the National Visa Center in New Hampshire and then on to the U.S. Consulate in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which then has to set up interviews with Colin and process his additional documentation submissions.

So there's the bad news. If it does actually take 5 months for our application just to get through the Texas center, then it'll be a tight race to get Colin into the U.S. before the very end of the year. Let's just hope the processing time for us is somehow above average.