What should I expect after my I-526 gets approved?

Congratulations. Surely you have a lawyer advising you. The next step is to get your documents and information ready to respond to the NVC so you can provide the necessary information to hopefully get scheduled for your final interview in the next few months.

When the I-526 petition is approved and you are not a national who is subject to the immigrant visa backlog, then your attorney should be able to assist you with the consular process and work with the National Visa Center to process your case for an immigrant visa interview to be scheduled in your home country. Generally, it takes three to six months for the consular process case to be completed and an immigrant visa to be issued in your passport, so you can enter the U.S. as a conditional permanent resident (unless you experience any delays with obtaining and providing required civil documents, police clearance to NVC or the U.S. embassy has a backlog for immigrant visa interviews, etc.). You should work with your immigration attorney to ensure your consular processing case goes smoothly.

The next step still depends on the visa availability of your country of origin. Check the Visa Bulletin issued on monthly basis by the U.S. State Department to get a good idea of when you will be able to do your consular interview.

It sounds as if you are outside the U.S. After the approval of your I-526, USCIS will forward your case to the National Visa Center. The NVC will contact you. At that time, you will need to file the DS-260 with the appropriate application fees. There are two parts to the DS-260. The first part is filled out by you and a separate DS-260 is completed for each family member seeking residency. The second part is completed in front of the consulate and at the interview. Various documents, including marriage certificates, birth certificates, etc. are required. Once you are approved at the consulate, you will be granted a six-month visa to enter the U.S. You have to enter in the six-month period. When you enter the U.S, immigration officers at the point of entry will stamp your passport and that will grant your conditional residency, which is good for two years. You may want to consult an immigration attorney to help you navigate the consular processing to ensure you have all of the proper documentation and are prepared for the interview.

The Form I-526 included in your I-526 petition should have indicated that you would proceed with applying for an immigration visa at a U.S. consular post abroad. You or your immigration attorney should receive an email about proceeding with the immigrant visa application process. It is very important to respond to this email.

Given the fact that you now have an approval of your EB-5 investor petition on Form I-526, you should be scheduled for your final interview at the American consulate in your home country within approximately six to 12 months. First, you will receive notification from the National Visa Center (NVC), which you will have to respond to and show you are documentarily qualified. The NVC will then notify the designated American consular post, which will then schedule you and your immediate family, being your spouse and unmarried children under the age of 21, for your final interview. If you were physically in the U.S. for an appropriate amount of time in legal status you would be able to file an application for adjustment of status on Form I-485.

The case will be sent to National Visa Center. They will send a fee bill and instruct on sending all immigrant visa documents in preparation for the interview.

USCIS will be sending the approved I-526 files to the National Visa Center to start the consular processing for your visa application, which could take one to four months normally. The first thing they will do is issue the visa application fee bill. Because the old I-526 forms did not have the information on your family members, your lawyer must email NVC and ask for the family members to be added and issue visa fee bills for them before starting the DS-260 filing for every person in your family. Once the DS-260s and civil documents (including the police clearance) are submitted to NVC and they review, which takes 60 to 90 days, they will send an email stating that the review is complete and they are requesting an interview date and time from the appropriate consulate post. Depending on the post and the volume of the cases they must go through, the actual interview date could be about two to four months after NVC&#39s request. In total, you should anticipate approximately six months for this process to be done, depending on how quickly you and your lawyer could file the DS-260. Please note that obtaining the police clearance may take some time depending on how many places you have lived and how long those places take in issuing those clearances.

For non-Chinese or Vietnamese nationals processing under the EB-5 category, you are not subject to any delays in processing for your immigrant visa. Upon approval, the USCIS notifies the consulate you have chosen to process for your immigrant visa. Then the National Visa Center puts the file together, assigns a case number and proceeds to processing for your immigrant visa. We are seeing approximately 30 days or less for NVC to notify you of the next procedure, instructions, file number, etc.