Until 2024 there will be appointments to apply for business and tourist visas from the United States

The US Embassy in Colombia announced that, due to the congestion of applications to issue visas and renew them, the average waiting times will be about 3 years. For this reason, they pointed out that appointments for the issuance of visas for travel, tourism or business will be enabled again until 2024.

Although, they explained that there will be some exceptions, for example, when it comes to emergencies (under consideration by the US government), humanitarian issues that do not wait, in addition, children under 14 years of age and older than 79, along with citizens who want to renew their expired visa, will be able to access this document without having to carry out the interview.

These delays have occurred since the beginning of the pandemic, which has generated “administrative brakes”, which has yielded figures that contrast the visas approved since 2019. For that year, almost 220,000 were delivered, in 2020 approximately 100,000 were delivered and in 2021 only 54,452, which shows a considerable reduction in recent years.

Despite the embassy's efforts to open more places, the office recommends that citizens who have a valid visa do not wait until it expires, and check the website frequently to see if any quotas are released and to be able to get closer appointments.

An embassy official pointed out in a video that, as of April 12, the measure of exemption from the interview began to take effect, which takes in the cases described above; he added that during this process the person applying for the procedure will not have their passport withheld, which was the case previously, and it took about two or three months to respond to this, which is why citizens could not travel to any other country.

The novelty will be that in the embassy system it will be possible to request an appointment to leave the passport, in addition to the fact that the documents will no longer be sent by the courier company usually used. The maximum period for the return of the passport will be two weeks.

It was also announced that priority is being given to applications for type visas: E, F, H, J, L, O and P; which include visas for study, work, athletes, artists, among others. For these cases, the average time of appointment allocation is 4 to 5 weeks.

In the case of non-immigrant visas, an interview will not be required either. The system will process the applicant's data and return a rating automatically, which will determine whether or not the application is approved.

In fact, people are reminded that the entity does not require any payment for the making or scheduling of appointments, nor for advancing them, the latter will only depend on the release of quotas or cancellations by citizens.

They also emphasize the fact that citizens applying for a visa are the ones who only and exclusively must carry out the procedures and interviews that are required, if they fail to do so, they may incur criminal offences, be disadvantaged in the visa process, among other sanctions.

Finally, the price of issuing the visa will depend on the type of permit and length of validity, in the case of tourism and business, they cost 160 dollars.

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