So I'll just post the entire timeline here for succinctness:
- 09/24/2024 - DS260 submission
- 07/24/2025 - Paid DV administrative fee (cashed)
- 08/05/2025 - Lockbox delivery of AOS package
- 08/07/2025 - Lockbox acceptance SMS
- 08/08/2025 - AOS Fee Payment cashed
- 08/19/2025 - Bio walk in
- 09/02/2025 - Submitted a congressional inquiry with my local representative
- 09/16/2025 - Received a response on the inquiry stating that my case was in a background check
- 09/22/2025 - Successful walk-in at FO, we were able to give our case number to someone who said they'll bring it to the supervisor
- 09/26/2025 - Another walk-in at the FO, this time we stayed a long time and talked with someone in detail about our case. The issue was that my (principal applicant) case was in background check and had not been cleared yet. My wife's was clear. The officer assured us that he would call rain or shine no matter what on Tuesday the 30th at 10:00.
D-Day
- 09/30/2025 10:00 - We check the online status in anticipation of his phone call, I see that my status was already updated to new card produced. 5 minutes later my wife's status updates. (We also see errors on USCIS website at this time about fetching our information... lol)
- 09/30/2025 11:35 - Our field officer calls to let me know that this morning the background check cleared, everything was ready and we were already approved and that's it. He joked that we don't have to drive to San Antonio anymore! I assured him he won't be bothered by us anymore, and he laughed and said of course don't worry you guys.
I'll update the spreadsheet as the final bits and pieces stream in like the welcome letter and of course the green (should be golden) card.
Overall this was a lengthy and very stressful process. To give some quick backstory prior to switching to AOS we had been waiting on CP for a long time. We became "current" in August, as of the June bulletin. This meant we should expect to normally receive a 2NL by the end of June and early July in exceptional cases. We waited all the way until July 24th until we gave up and decided to email the KCC to let them know we were changing to AOS.
@Britsimon gave me a bit of a bollocking for letting KCC know because we could've just sent the DV payment receipt and not notified the KCC and Dublin may have still scheduled us in the meantime. Well, turns out he couldn't have been more right. Dublin scheduled all remaining cases (including before and after our case number), on July 24th. Just one day after the KCC acknowledged our switch from CP to AOS.
Toward the end of the deadline we became increasingly stressed (as you can imagine), also thinking that if we hadn't changed from CP to AOS we'd probably already have our green card in hand at this point since Dublin actually did schedule all the remaining cases. With that said they scheduled exceptionally late, so of course, logically it makes sense to be very worried at the time that they were not going to schedule at all.
In the end we did what we thought was right and we made it, albeit with a few more gray hairs.
With all of that I'm very grateful to
@Sm1smom and
@Britsimon for the leadership in documenting and clarifying on many details of the process and tirelessly answering questions for free every single day of the week at all hours and I thank
@SusieQQQ who's always there to give a bit of kind encouragement, knowledge and moral support during these tougher times. Doing this alone without your guidance would be a lonely path of dread so you guys lighten it up an awful lot and make people far more confident and assured in what to do and what options are available to them. I'm hopeful that at least I contributed something with my push for Sm1smom to use a Google Form to improve the spreadsheet AOS timeline information gathering for the future which may help standardize the data a bit and get people to keep things up to date.
With all of that, of course you'll be unlikely to see me around here anymore. I'll miss you all, in a strange way this was a huge part of our lives where a bunch of strangers came together in a shared experience of an extreme rollercoaster of stress and emotion.
Thanks again everyone. Congratulations to everyone, good luck to all future applicants!
Now it's time to live the American dream!
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