Daily Digest, September 7, 2026: Do Not Cancel Your Biometrics Because Your Interview Was Cancelled

A quiet day before what should be a loud one. The useful thing today is small, practical, and is currently costing people time they cannot get back.

Your biometrics appointment is probably still on

Several applicants whose interviews were cancelled have been cancelling their biometrics appointments too, on the reasonable assumption that if the interview is off, everything is off.

At Mumbai, that assumption is wrong. Three separate applicants confirm they attended and completed biometrics on 1 September with their interviews already cancelled. One had an interview booked for 10 September that had been rescheduled; the biometrics went ahead regardless. A fourth called the helpline and was told to proceed.

This matters because the cost is asymmetric. If you attend biometrics you did not strictly need, you lose an afternoon. If you cancel biometrics you did need, you cannot complete the interview when it is finally reissued — and you go back into a queue that is currently weeks to months long.

One important caveat, because it is not universal: we hold a case at Manila where the VAC biometrics appointment itself was cancelled on 25 August, two days before the interview went the same way. So this varies by post. The rule we would draw is narrower than "always go": do not cancel it yourself. Let the post cancel it if the post intends to.

The portal is now lagging at a fourth post

An applicant at Ho Chi Minh City received their reschedule email on 30 August. A week later the scheduling portal still displays the original 28 September appointment. A second applicant at the same post reports exactly the same mismatch, and says people who attended in August saw it too.

That makes four posts where the portal has lagged the email. Set against the Tokyo case where a replacement appointment appeared in the portal with no email at all, the conclusion stands and is worth repeating because it keeps catching people:

Neither the email nor the portal is authoritative. A portal still showing your old appointment is not evidence the appointment survived, and an empty inbox is not evidence nothing has been scheduled. The only reliable check reported so far is phoning the visa appointment service.

What tomorrow is

The government is due to file a sworn declaration on 8 September setting out how cases affected by the vacated 75-country pause are being identified, whether documents are being requested, and whether interviews are being scheduled. A declaration under penalty of perjury is a different instrument from a lawyer's brief.

We report that as described by people following the filings rather than as something we have read. But it is the first fixed date on which the group refused under that policy should learn something concrete, after more than two weeks in which nothing about their cases has visibly moved.

We will cover what it actually says rather than what people hope it says.

One thing we are not going to repeat

A widely-shared K-1 summary circulated today describing new consular directives, a tightened I-134 standard approaching the immigrant-visa bar, and automated flagging of petitions. Parts of it match what we see — K-1 cases are demonstrably caught in this wave because they are processed by immigrant visa units, which our own tracked cases show.

But the policy claims in it are not something we can verify, and confident secondhand summaries are exactly how a rumour becomes a fact people plan around. We are not going to pass those on as findings. If they turn out to be real we will report them then.

Today's numbers: 39 cancellations across 19 posts, 7 confirmed replacement dates, all still from the August round. None of the September cancellations has produced a new date.

If your biometrics went ahead — or was cancelled — that is genuinely useful to add to the tracker, because right now we cannot tell anyone which posts do which.