My I-129F Petition has been approved for more than a month now and I still don’t have a Case Number. My petition expires in 3 months. What do I do?

Approved I-129F Petitions are forwarded to the National Visa Center (NVC) for case number assignments. This process usually takes anywhere from a week of I-797 approval (NOA2) to 8 weeks. These approved I-129F petitions usually have 4 months of validity, which in normal cases, petitioners and beneficiaries shouldn’t be alarmed about. This means that approved petitions/cases need to be forwarded to the designated U.S. Consulate of the beneficiary before it expires.

When the U.S. Consulate receives the case:

• They send “Letter(s) of Eligibility” are sent out to both petitioner and beneficiary.
• In addition to that, the beneficiary receives visa processing instructions along with their Eligibility Letters.
• The National Visa Center sends a notice to the USC Petitioner about the Case Number being assigned to them, too.

In some cases, if you still haven’t gotten your Case Number past 8 weeks, you should call the USCIS Hotline to confirm if they have indeed sent the case to NVC. USCIS will confirm if they did send it out to NVC. If you call NVC and they tell you that they still haven’t gotten your case, chances are, USCIS didn’t forward your petition to NVC but to the National Records Center (NRC).  It could’ve been “accidentally” tagged as an “inactive petition”, therefore, sending your case to NRC means it’s being archived.

What is NRC, you ask? It is USCIS’s Center for record-keeping, an archiving facility.

At this point you shouldn’t let go of this trail. You’d have to call USCIS and ask for a Tier-2 / Manager / Superior to discuss your case and get it back. 

Why do I know this? Because it happened to me (and it does happen to other people too).  Some say it would take 2 months to get your case back. Fortunately for us, we caught it just in time as it was being shipped to NRC!

• Contact USCIS to confirm your case is at NVC.
• Then contact NVC if they have received your case and if they have assigned a case number.