Daily Digest, August 29, 2026: The Rescheduling Has an End Date — and a Cost Nobody Is Counting

Yesterday we said the gap between a cancelled interview and its replacement ran from nine days to a month. A day of new reports has sharpened that, and the answer is better than we made it sound.

The replacements are days out, not a month

The reschedules now coming through are landing on 1, 2, 4 and 8 September, and the appointments they replace were on 24, 26 and 28 August. That is a shift of a few days in most cases. Our first confirmed pair — an immigrant visa interview moved from 24 August to 2 September, nine days — now looks representative rather than lucky.

The thirty-day case at Dhaka is starting to look like the outlier, not the rule. If your late-August appointment vanished, the base case is that you lose about a week, not a month. We are still working from a small number of confirmed original-to-replacement pairs, so treat that as a direction rather than a promise.

There is now a date attached to the end of this

Applicants tracking the litigation report that the government has told the court the current worldwide rescheduling is temporary, through 31 August, while posts finish implementation and public-charge training. We have not read the filing ourselves and are reporting it as it was reported to us.

What makes it worth passing on is that it is the second line pointing at the same date, from a completely unrelated direction. Two days ago we logged an applicant who emailed their post directly and was told replacement dates would be issued after 31 August. One is a court filing and the other is a consular officer answering an email, and they agree.

A related caution from the same reports: the government is said to have raised a separate procedural point that stays further enforcement proceedings into late September. That is not the same thing as the pause continuing until then, and we would expect to see it misread that way over the next week.

The cost nobody is counting: expired medicals

This is the thing we had not seen before today, and it is the most actionable item here.

An applicant at Tashkent had their medical exam done in January. It has now expired — they typically run six months — because the case sat still. They called the panel physician to book a new one and were told the clinic cannot schedule a replacement exam without a request from the post. The post has not been in contact. So the applicant is holding an expired document, cannot fix it themselves, and cannot make anyone ask them to.

We hold a second case where the CEAC record updated exactly two days after that applicant's medical passed its six-month mark. We are not going to claim the expiry caused the update from one case. But if interviews restart in September, a queue of people whose medicals lapsed during the wait will need new ones, and the clinics are gated behind embassy requests that are not being sent yet.

If your medical is close to six months old, this is worth raising with your post in writing now rather than after your appointment is reissued.

A CEAC update is not an outcome

One case is a useful corrective for anyone refreshing the status page. An applicant interviewed on 7 January, refused at the time, saw their case last-updated date jump to 26 August — seven months later, in the same week the worldwide rescheduling began. The status still reads refused.

Somebody opened that file. Nothing about the decision changed. Movement means a person touched the record, not that the record improved, and several applicants in the same discussion pointed out the mundane explanation for a lot of these: emailing the post about anything can itself bump the date.

Two more posts, and a second person turned away at the gate

The tracker now covers eleven posts. Two are new today. An IR1 applicant at Ho Chi Minh City had a 24 August appointment and still has no replacement date.

At Phnom Penh, a K-1 applicant and their children travelled to the post for a 25 August interview and were turned away at the gate. The reason given on the day was that the embassy computers were not working, and the post later confirmed by email that the appointment was rescheduled without giving a date. The stated reason is different from everything else here — but the date sits precisely inside the window, and it is the second case of someone finding out by turning up. That failure mode has now happened at posts on two continents.

The window itself is both sharper and wider than we said this morning. Every one of the thirteen appointments we hold between 23 and 28 August was cancelled. We had drawn that window as 23–27 August in an earlier version of this post; re-checking the older discussions turned up a third person turned away in person, on 28 August, so if your appointment fell on the 28th you were not outside it. That correction matters more than the tidier number did — our rows simply happened to stop at the 27th, which is not the same as the cancellations stopping there.

The far edge looks better. From 31 August onward, seven of nine reports are confirmed still standing, including a 2 September appointment at Bogotá with no cancellation email and a second-hand account of interviews going ahead on 31 August itself, with the posts ringing applicants beforehand to confirm.

Fifteen cancellations, twelve of them still with no replacement date. If yours moved — or if it was in that window and did not — you can add it to the cancellations tracker. The untouched ones are what make the cutoff visible, so they matter as much as the cancelled ones.