What do you do after the I-140 is approved?

Two routes and what decides between them

The first route is adjustment of status: you are already in the US in an acceptable status, a visa is available for your category and country of birth, and you file I-485 without leaving. The upside is that work and travel authorization can be requested alongside; the downside is dependence on your current status and on the visa staying available while the case is pending.

The second is consular processing: the case moves from USCIS to the National Visa Center, goes through a preparation stage there, and the visa decision is made by a consular officer abroad. The upside is that it does not require being in the US; the downside is that the decision is made afresh, by a different agency.

Three factors decide: where you physically are, what status you hold in the US if you are there, and whether a visa is available for your category and country of birth at the relevant moment. For many people the third is decisive and entirely outside their control.

Switching routes mid-way is possible but not free: moving a case from one track to the other adds months. Better to decide once, deliberately, than to drift.

What to do in the first weeks after approval

Keep the approval notice and the whole case correspondence in one place, electronically and on paper. The petition number is needed at every subsequent step, and reconstructing documents later costs more than storing them now.

Write out a residence and employment chronology with dates - needed both for the form and to work out which countries will require police certificates. It is the same list the translations and certificates are later checked against.

Start ordering the slow documents: police certificates from countries you used to live in, replacement certificates for lost originals, name-change papers. In that order - slowest first.

Check who in the family is travelling with you. Forms and documents are prepared for each derivative applicant separately; an incomplete set for one family member delays the whole case, not just their part.

And do not overestimate the speed of the next step. The gap between approval and an interview invitation depends not on the quality of your petition but on the queue for your category and country and on the workload of the particular consulate.

What approval does not guarantee

Approval of the petition is a finding that you fit the immigration category. It does not settle admissibility: medical questions, past status violations, prior visas, security checks. Those are decided at the next stage, separately.

A case can be returned. A consulate may send a petition back to USCIS if it considers that circumstances have emerged which were not before the adjudicator. Rare but real, and it does not automatically revoke the approval - it is a separate procedure with its own rules.

Administrative processing after the interview is also possible: the decision is deferred indefinitely and documents may be requested again. Only one thing helps here - a complete, consistent, pre-assembled set.

Finally, approval does not freeze your circumstances. A change of employer, marital status or country of residence affects the later steps, and it is better to think about such changes in advance than to explain them after the fact at the interview.