San Francisco USCIS

We got! We got it!!!! :D Wow, it did not take long at all! Their website is off by a month. Hopefully this post can help others. As many of you know, waiting is hard and not having a clue about their timeframe makes it even harder. Our lawyer thinks we may have our 3 year old baby girl home by Halloween! Yipeee! (We are doing an identified independent adoption in the Dominican Republic.) Best wishes to all.

We used the San JOse office, but have heard the San Fran office is quicker...got ours in 2 1/2 weeks!

Hi: I already have an approved I-600 A (May, 2005). We got a referral and adopted a baby in September, 2005. We filed for I-600 @ San Francisco office on 26th October. Does anyone have an idea how long it takes? I am very desperate to get an answer. I know 2 people (1 in Atlanta who got approved in 2 weeks and the other got it in 1 week). We have not heard a word. Someone plz help. I shall very much appreciate.

You'll have better luck in the country specific forum rather than here about getting the averages for process times. It can average more than three months in some countries and in others as little as one month or less it all depends on the country, the agencies, IR3/IR4 involved and if there are any mistakes or other problems like medical that need to be resolved. HTH, Johnny

Johnny, The I-600A approval time has nothing to do with the foreign country you choose, whether an IR-3 or IR-4 is involved, etc. Perhaps you are confusing the I-600A with the I-600. The I-600A form is submitted to your local USCIS office, along with your homestudy and various documents like your birth certificate. Its purpose is to see whether you, as a prospective parent, are fit to bring an orphan to the U.S. It does not have anything to do with the child to be adopted, because in most cases, you haven't yet been referred a child. And the only reason for specifying a country on the I-600A is that, if you are approved, you will want the USCIS to send a cable to the U.S. Embassy in that foreign country, confirming the approval. Then, when you finally get a referral, travel to adopt your child, and proceed to the U.S. Embassy in the country to get him/her a visa, the Embassy will know that you are approved to adopt. It will then look at your I-600 (a separate form that you usually submit at the Embassy) mainly to see if your child qualifies for immigration. As to the I-600A, you need to know that all of the various USCIS offices within the U.S. have different processing times. The main reason has to do with staffing. Some offices appear to be understaffed, although the problem may actually be that the offices allocate their staff among adoption and other functions differently. If you are adopting from Russia and I am adopting from China, and our paperwork goes to the same USCIS office on the same day, we will probably get our approvals at about the same time, unless there is a problem with the way we filled out the form or with the way our social workers wrote the homestudy reports. However, if we are adopting from the same country, but my paperwork goes to the Arlington,VA office and your paperwork goes to the Atlanta, GA office, the approval time is likely to be very different. One could be approved a few weeks, while the other could take a few months. Each USCIS office also has certain rules that may differ a bit from those of another office. One of the most common differences concerns the homestudy report. Some offices will let you submit the I-600A before the homestudy is complete, and submit the homestudy report later. Others insist that they be submitted together. Also, some offices may send you a letter telling you when and where to get fingerprinted for your FBI criminal records check before they receive your homestudy report, but most will not do so until they get the homestudy report. Again, I think that you are confusing the I-600A and the I-600, which are two totally different documents. There are some people who never fill out the I-600A -- mostly people who identify a child on their own and choose to get approval for themselves and their child at one time. However, the average adoptive family has to complete the I-600A AND the I-600. The I-600A lets the USCIS approve the prospective parents, and that approval is not conditioned upon the country from which they are adopting or whether one parent or both will travel. The approval form, which is called the 171-H or the 797-C, may need to be sent to the foreign country's adoption authority, before a child can be referred. The I-600 is generally filed overseas, once the family has adopted the child. In some countries, such as China, approval is pretty much a given, because the child's paperwork is almost always acceptable. In others, there can be lengthy investigations of the child's eligibility for immigration, because it is not always clear that the child is an "eligible orphan", has been acquired ethically, and so on. Sharon Sharon

I am just guessing, but I think johnny was referring to baby101's post which talks about 600.

Emiko, You got it right... Johnny

I have adopted from Pakistan and there is no specific country forum for that. Now my application (I-600 petition) is on its way to US embassy in Islamabad. They already have our I-600A approval (I-171H) copy and we have receipt from US Islamabad Embassy also.Another wait..... We have all the documents...now again the same Qs. How much time-I-600 takes. (We already had our I-600A approved) and fingerprints also done. Plz help!!!Thx

baby101.... That's a really really tough one... especially with all the happenings going on there... I don't think you're going to get any current information off of the forums other than the averages which will mostly be useless in your case. I think you'll get better results calling the Embassy directly or going through the State Department to find out processing wait times for the investigation (I-604) and interview procedures with the travel warnings that are up. I hope they have staff there! When I was offered a Job there over a year ago there was only a skeleton crew in the Embassy and it might have even been closed but I dont think it was. HereҒs the link to the country specific information: [url]http://travel.state.gov/family/adoption/country/country_432.html[/url] HTH, Johnny