the ban on those countries are for new visas not for applications that are already in process

@ so does that mean anyone doing consular processing with necessary steps approved can still get processed? with the ban im assuming they cant issue any visa for them even for people still in the process, in turn making more visas available from 10k bucket for AOS applicants?

or maybe people from countries other than the banned ones will become faster for consular processing and have no impact on timings of AOS

yes. it should be

I think it’s possible. During Covid Trump did ban consular immigrant visas, so most of the categories became current! I hope it happens again!

Possible as the consular process has been paused. This admin did so a similar thing back in 2017 and lot of AOS backlog were cleared.

there are 39 countries which are on the ban list which means they will not issue GC regardless it’s AOS or consular. Rest of the countries are on pause for just consular process not AOS. So it’s highly possible that visa bulletin can move forward pretty quick. let’s see and hope for the best