Why Immigrant Visa Interviews Were Cancelled Worldwide This Week — and What We Got Wrong
Over the past week, applicants have reported immigrant visa interviews cancelled at posts across Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America — among them Ankara, Bangkok, Kathmandu, Ciudad Juárez, Seoul, London, Manila, Rio de Janeiro, San Salvador, Nairobi and Bogotá. An immigration attorney put the count at a minimum of fourteen posts. Some applicants were told the day before; some woke up to a message; one was instructed simply not to come to the embassy until a new date was issued.
We flagged the first sign of this on 23 August and reached for the wrong explanation. We had a report from a two-stage post where applicants finishing their document appointment were suddenly told the consular interview would be about a month out instead of the usual few days. It came two days after a federal court vacated the 75-country immigrant visa pause, and the obvious inference was that posts were holding cases while Washington worked out how to comply. We wrote it up while stating plainly that causation was not established. That caution turns out to have been the only thing we got right.
What the reporting now says. The Washington Post reported that the State Department paused immigrant visa appointments worldwide so that consular officers could be trained on stricter public-charge screening, and the department confirmed appointments were being adjusted because of a global training initiative. A former official told the paper the pause ran from Monday 24 August through the end of the month, and that as of the 25th the training materials had still not reached posts — which would explain why applicants were getting different answers from different embassies.
Two caveats worth keeping. The end-of-August timeline comes from that source, not from any public announcement, so there is no official restart date. And the department has not framed this as a pause at all — only as appointments being adjusted.
The detail that breaks the court-ruling theory is the one we should have weighted more heavily at the time: cancellations hit posts whose applicants were never covered by the 75-country pause at all. Turkish nationals were never on that list. Neither were Thai applicants. If this were about implementing a ruling that applied to 75 specific countries, there would be no reason to stand down interviews in countries the policy never touched. A worldwide training programme explains that; a compliance hold does not.
Rescheduling has already started, which is the part that matters most if you are in it. We now have confirmed replacement dates: an applicant at Dhaka received a document-review-complete notice with an interview set for 22 September, and another paused-country applicant was given 16 September. At Bogotá the mechanism was different — an official notice that the application status had been modified and that a further in-person appointment was required, to be booked through the scheduling system. That distinction is worth knowing: in some cases a new date arrives, in others you are expected to go and make one.
The Dhaka date is also a small vindication of the original report. Staff there announced roughly a month; the replacement interview landed almost exactly a month out. The figure was right even though our explanation for it was not.
Does this affect you? Almost certainly not, if you are like most people reading this site. Immigrant visas are 2% of the cases we track — 67 out of 3,360. Everything above concerns immigrant visa interviews. If you are waiting on H-1B stamping, an F-1, an H-4 or a visitor visa, nothing here describes your case.
If you are in the affected 2%: the reported timeline ends with August, replacement dates are landing in the second half of September, and at some posts you may need to book the new appointment yourself rather than wait for one. We will update this page as more confirmed dates come in — what we count and what we don't is set out separately.