While the new United States Consulate and Embassy on Republic of Colombia Avenue in Santo Domingo’s Arroyo Hondo sector looks spanking new, the computer problems affecting the issuing of non-resident visas persist. The office of Consular Affairs is working towards restoring the Non-Immigrant Visa System whose collapse caused the emission of passports and visas to be suspended.
The news was published online at www.travel.state.gov and has all the last minute information.
Apparently last week the State Department introduced some changes that were supposed to optimize the system’s performance. They said that high priority cases such as immigrant visas and adoptions are being processed.
In the meantime, new passports for citizens are taking between four and six weeks. The explanation for all this was that the consular officials are not permitted to issue visas that are not “approved by our database system, so that some embassies and consulates will have to temporarily limit their appointments and reschedule interviews.”