This question comes to us from Instagram. "My husband and I have been waiting seven months for the migration application. You guys said it would take three to five months. Why are we in month seven and have not received migration response?"
First and foremost, let me make something clear with RapidVisa. We have no control over the timeline with USCIS, the National Visa Center or the US embassies and Department of State. When I give out a timeline or one of our representatives gives out a timeline, it's merely just an estimate. We do that out of professional courtesy to try and give you a baseline, if you will. We've successfully processed over 40,000 petitions. Our success rate is over 99.7%. That means we've seen a lot, we've done a lot and I can tell you, as Ben stated earlier, we've had petitions approved at the USCIS stage in as little as two weeks. We've seen some go as long as a year. But if you've taken statistics or if you want to take an average means, you look at those 40,000 petitions and you average out the timeline, it usually comes down to five to six months for a fiance visa and six to seven months for a spousal visa.
Now, as I stated earlier when I answered another gentleman's question about timelines, just recently in the last six months we have seen a huge change in the processing time. A lot of delays. If you listen to the news, immigration news or you watch the news, immigration has been in the news every single day. Every time I open up the news online or turn on the television, immigration is in the news. That's because of the Trump administration.
You've probably heard or read that they put some new policies in place. They're scrutinizing petitions and I'll break that down for you. What it really means is that they're taking longer with the background checks. It's called the name checks in the database. The FBI, criminal databases, now they're backed up and you can check the processing times online with USCIS. They have processing times for the various processing centers. You can call the USCIS. I just talked to a customer recently that said the USCIS now is just giving out bogus information or just making up timelines. They're telling them now anywhere from 10 to 12 months, which it's our experience that it hasn't gone that long yet, but I can tell you anything that we may have told you six months ago, automatically add two to three months to that processing time at the USCIS stage.
This is the most current information that we have as of today. That will probably change tomorrow. Again, I apologize if you feel like you are misled in any way, but we only give estimates. We have no control over the timeline. There is one thing that we do control and that is how quickly we get your paperwork back to you. On average, we usually get the paperwork back to you in four business hours. That is one thing that is within our control. We may go outside that window a little bit, but you can hold us to the things that we control, but not to the things that we can't control.
