Home Study/Starting Process

You'll need to get a background/CPS check for every state you've lived in since you were 18 years old. Our homestudy was $650, but that's because we used the same agency for our first adoption so the fee was cut in half. Homestudy will include a financial declaration, CPS clearance for each state since 18 y/o, 5 reference letters and fingerprints for the court. Probably a couple other things that I'm forgetting. Anticipate your homestudy needing to be refined before USCIS approval. Our adoption agency told us they've never seen a homestudy that didn't need at least one revision. Usually something minor, but with the newer Hague regulations it's more strict.

First good luck with the process. I haven't been through the new visa process. However, it may be important to know that your homestudy follows both the rules for your STATE and the country that you are adopting from. So you may find that you have a lot more requirements than listed below. Truthfully, getting my homestudy finished was much harder than my Dossier. In MD, we had to have sign-off from the fire department (yep they brought the whole rig to investigate our fire extinguisher, escape plan, the size of the numbers on the outside of our house, and the number of smoke detectors. Then on to the health inspection. Everything was inspected to ensure it was to code. We had to get separate clearances from the state to make sure we didn't owe back child support, some other state md list, health checkup with TB tests for everyone in the house (these had to be different than the dossier check-ups because of dating issues.) We had to do state fingerprinting (different than the Visa fingerprinting and the dossier fingerprinting). Then I believe everything that was listed above like references, interviews, etc. Everything had a reason it was just a bit much to coordinate it all and get it done relatively quickly since some of the checks could take - well as long as they took. We didn't have a resubmit the homestudy to get the Visa - either time we submitted. I think the uscis contact in Baltimore was very good at giving informal feedback to the agencies. Only one person, but she really did a good job. Like I said, good luck and try not to get frustrated with the process.