If you have an appointment in San José for a US tourist or business visa, keep it. Nothing has changed for you. The US Embassy in Costa Rica confirmed today that it is not suspending appointments for nonimmigrant visas. Tourism, business and other nonimmigrant categories are going ahead exactly as scheduled.
One group is affected, and it is a small one. If your interview is for an immigrant visa — the kind that leads to permanent residence in the United States — your appointment may have been moved. The embassy said those interviews were rescheduled only for the final days of August.
That matters because the news that reached Costa Rica this week sounded far worse than what is actually happening here. The story started with reports that the United States had halted visa appointments at its embassies and consulates worldwide. Applicants in several countries received emails telling them their scheduled interviews were cancelled and would be rescheduled later, with no new date attached. Some of the international coverage described it as a freeze on all visa interviews.
Other reporting described it more narrowly, as a pause affecting immigrant visa interviews only. In Costa Rica, the embassy has now drawn that line clearly. Nonimmigrant appointments stand. Immigrant appointments in the last stretch of August do not.
The reason behind the pause is a training programme. The State Department began an in-depth course for consular officers worldwide in early August, and appointment schedules are being adjusted to make room for it. A department spokesperson said the aim is to make sure every officer evaluates applicants the same way, no matter which embassy they work in.
What the officers are being trained on is a rule known as public charge. It is not new. Under US immigration law, an applicant can be refused an immigrant visa if the officer concludes they are likely to end up dependent on public assistance after arriving. The training is about how officers reach that conclusion, and the expectation is that they will apply it more strictly than before.
The State Department has not said how long the training will run, or when normal scheduling resumes. That is the part nobody can answer yet. There is a separate legal fight running alongside all of this, and it is easy to confuse the two. On August 21, a federal judge in Manhattan struck down a different policy that had suspended immigrant visas for applicants from 75 countries, ruling that the State Department had gone beyond its legal authority.
Costa Rica was not on that list, and that ruling has nothing to do with this week’s scheduling changes. So what should you actually do? If your appointment is for a tourist or business visa, go. Bring what you were told to bring and do not reschedule on your own. If your appointment is for an immigrant visa in the next few days, check your email, including the folder your provider dumps promotional mail into.
Rescheduling notices are going out by email, and a missed message is the most likely way someone ends up at the embassy gate on a day they no longer have a slot. Check your appointment status directly through the official appointment system before you travel to San José. People come in from Guanacaste, the Southern Zone and the Caribbean for these interviews, and a five-minute check is cheaper than a wasted day and a hotel night.
Anyone starting a new application can still file. The pause concerns interviews, not the submission of paperwork. The wider picture is worth keeping in view. The United States is tightening how it screens people who want to live there permanently, and the training now underway is part of that.
Wait times, refusal rates and the level of financial documentation officers ask for are all likely to shift over the coming months. For anyone with a case in progress, the safest assumption is that the process gets slower before it gets faster.
