Interview Update
Field Office: Reno, NV
Interview date: 08/24/2021
Interview time: 7:30am
Interview was quick and easy overall.
I am the DV selectee and my wife and daughter are the derivatives. We have two other young kids (2yrs and 5 months olds) who are USC’s. It’s a 4hr drive from where we live to the field office and so we arrived in Reno on the evening of the 23rd. We took along our two USC kids as we did not have anyone to leave them with. On the morning of the 24th, we arrived at the Field Office at approximately 7:20 and were met at the entrance by a security officer. He asked to check our interview letters. He spotted that my wife’s interview and that of my daughter’s were scheduled for later times (8:30 and 10:30 respectively) in the day but I explained to him we were a family and so he was okay with that and wondered why they gave us different times. He took our IDs (passports), went inside and then returned. He said we were good to come inside and had no problems with us coming in with our two USCs. He had me read some covid questions that had been pasted on the entrance door to make sure my answers were “no” for everyone in the family. They were the usual questions about experiencing cough and what not symptoms. The security officer then led us through the entrance door to the security check point where checking mimicked airport security checks. After completing that, we were asked to be seated in a waiting room. I left our interview letters at a window in the waiting room as was instructed by the security and the letter was picked up by the interview officer a couple of minutes after. He then called us to his office to begin the interview.
Before diving into questions, he mentioned that he didn’t have a whole lot of questions. He said they had not handled many DV cases historically but knew DV gets prioritized quickly. He mentioned that he knew that visas were available and so that was not a problem. He had us stand to do the oath and then he went through questions about our physical address, whether I was still working with the company I had on the form, which organizations we were part of and then the yes/no questions. He said all was good and that he would go into the system and update. I mentioned that my last name had been misspelled and he noted that. I also gave him recent paystubs, bank account statements and a copy of my daughter’s new birth certificate which had a correction. I also mentioned we had not done biometrics yet and then he said that’s the most important one and so he quickly arranged for us to do our biometrics. The Reno ASC is in the same building and so he took us over to get that done. The IO didn’t ask to see any originals; he just had us append our signatures on the forms after the questions.
All in all, we were in and out in about an hour between the interview and the biometrics. Biometrics went fine with no issues and was quick too. Just before we left the office, I asked the IO when to expect feedback and he said biometrics usually clears in 48hr; he had everything he needed but will send an RFE if he needed anything more. Everyone there was so nice and polite. Our statuses have not changed yet (still finger fee received) but we wait patiently and are confident we’ll see approval soon. Will update the group as soon as our statuses change.
Apologies for making this long but I hope the details may be useful to someone as other experiences shared on here have been useful to us. Thanks to everyone on this forum and thanks to
@Sm1smom and
@SusieQQQ for their great efforts. Also thanks to
@yaw199 … we live in the same area and luckily from the same country and so we have been in constant touch monitoring progresses of each other.
