Living in the USA

Visa CR-1 / IR-1 [step 3, embassy]

After successfully completing the USCIS and NVC steps, your file is sent to the US Embassy in Paris (or wherever you’re from).
Almost 3 weeks after having our Case Complete, we finally received the “Packet 4”, which contains the date and time of interview, a reminder on the last necessary steps and a checklist of papers to bring to the interview.
I do not think I said it before because it must have seemed obvious, but all correspondence/information is in English.

First, go to nvc.state.gov/interview to download the PDF corresponding to your embassy (Paris for us) which explains everything in details.

Several steps are included in this step 3:

You have to confirm your interview appointment online and register the address to which you want to receive your visa.
You must have a medical examination with one of the accredited doctors (two options in Paris) – the examination costs 300€.
BE CAREFUL, it’s a step you prepare in advance !!
Before going to the medical examination:
– Check with your primary care doctor you are up to date with your vaccines in the US standards (not the French -or your country- ones).
– You must go to one of the accredited laboratories to have a urine test and a blood test (for syphilis and gonorrhea tests) – 2 x 30€.
– You must have a chest x-ray in the only certified center – 40€.
It is possible to do everything in one day, doing the tests and the x-ray early in the morning so that the doctor receives the results in time for your appointment in the afternoon, but personally, I did not want to stress unnecessarily about the deadlines. So if you can afford it, spend an extra day in Paris, and take your tests the day before your medical visit. An intention that was confirmed by 2 testimonials of girls who had some stressful setbacks to get their results on time!
Gather all the documents on the checklist.
– These are more or less the originals of the papers you have provided to NVC.
– Remember to request a birth certificate and a copy of your criminal record in the 3 months preceding the interview because you need recent ones.
– You need to ID pics in the American format (5 x 5 cm).
– Bring new evidences of relationship, especially to show that the relationship still exists, since it has been months/a year from the moment you started your visa process!
Pass the interview!
You are announced face to face if your visa is approved (or not).
I will detail mine in a future post, but you can easily find other shared experiences online.

If your visa is granted, your passport will be kept and your file will update to Administrative Processing. Not to be confused with the AP that some complicated case files face. Here, it just means that your visa will be printed.
You can follow the evolution on the CEAC website.

After Administrative Processing, it will change to Issued. You just have to wait to receive your passport with your visa at home! It will also be accompanied by an envelope that must not be opened and that will be given to the agent at your Point of Entry in the USA. You must then pay the last $220* Immigration Fee (the cost of your Green Card).
* as always, fees vary from one year to another so check them here.

Visa CR-1 / IR-1 [step 2, NVC]

Once step 1 is behind you, your file is sent to the National Visa Center.

Second step: NVC

The NVC receives your file and assigns it a case number.
The petitioner (US Citizen) and the beneficiary (and the lawyer if there is one) receive the invoices for the fees, the Affidavit Of Support Fee ($120 last December) and the Immigrant Visa Application Processing Fee ($325 in December ). Since we had a lawyer, he was the one who made the payments online.
In the same email, you also receive the cover sheet of the case file that you must put together (and which list all the documents you need to provide).
Once the payments are cashed, your DS-260 is generated (see below).

There are then 2 “requests” to manage simultaneously.

The DS-260 (there is no order, you can start with this one or the other).
This is an online questionnaire that you fill out on https://ceac.state.gov/IV/Login.aspx with your case number and your invoice number. Watch out, it’s long! Fortunately, you can save it and fill it in several times.

The information to provide:

Family information: your parents, their addresses, the same for your spouse.
ALL your addresses since the age of 16 (TWELVE for me !!!!!!) and your future American address.
The list of your trips to the USA and their duration.
You must answer security questions (similar to those you answer on your travels).
If you have or want a social security number.
Information about your current job or the list of your previous jobs.

Once you have completed everything and re-checked (several times and with a rested head!), you submit.

The I-864 packet.
To build this packet, you must follow the instructions of your cover sheet. The papers depend on your situation and what you have already provided in your initial file.
Here is a list of what is needed:

Affidavit of Support of your sponsor/s, IRS Tax Transcripts, W2 or other evidences of incomes.
Proof of Relationship (Marriage Certificate)
Proof of US statut (US spouse’s birth certificate or passeport)
Birth Certificate of the alien spouse and its certified English translation.
Criminal record of the Alien spouse (from all countries where you have lived more than 6 months since you’re 16 years old, so I had to provide one from Denmark) and its certified English translation (this translation does not seem obligatory , but we did not want to take risks).
Copy of the valid passport (valid for more than 6 months after the planned departure) of the Alien citizen.

You then send it by mail and the day your file arrives at the NVC is what is called your Scan Date (the day the file is entered into the system). Then starts the wait again, which used to be short (between 2 and 4 weeks) before but can sometimes go up to 12 weeks (we waited 9 weeks) since your Scan Date.

If you have forgotten a document… it’s horror! You will receive a checklist and it will be necessary to provide these documents as soon as possible BUT the date of their arrival at the NVC will be your new Scan Date so… yes, you have guessed right, you must wait again for a similar amount of time!

Once everything is OK you finally have CASE COMPLETE (you receive a letter/email)! At this point, you can begin to relax, because you fulfill all the administrative and financial conditions to obtain the visa (but there is still the medical visit and the famous interview).

Your file is then sent to the embassy.

Categories: Living in the USA, US immigration: CR1 (spouse) Visa

Visa CR-1 / IR-1 [step 1, USCIS]

I will write a series of articles on that visa, to detail the different stages.
If you meet the requirements for a cr-1/ir-1 visa, start by gathering some proofs of your relationship, and follow these steps.

First step: USCIS

The US citizen completes and files a “Petition for Alien Relative”, form I-130.
Send it along with your file (proofs of relationships) to the USCIS center you depend on (depending on where you live, you can check and find the addresses here).
Pay the fees, send them with your petition (we paid $420 but they now amount to $535 and increase each year – see here).
There are no “rules” regarding the documents that you must attach to your petition, but it is advisable to include some proofs of authenticity and duration of your relationship such as epistolary or telephone exchanges, some photos and possible testimonials from friends.

To give you an idea, I will list exactly everything we included in ours:

form G-28 because we were represented by a lawyer.
form I-130
form G-325A (Biographic Information) x 2 (one form each spouse) – a summary of the latest work places and housing of both spouses.
3 testimonies (my mother-in-law – who also announced her intention to be co-sponsor, my mother and my best friend, who had both made the trip to the USA for our wedding), signed in front of a notary, with presentation of a ID.
our wedding certificate
our birth certificates (+ certified English translation for mine)
ten photos
letters from him and from me (8-10 each) that shows a continuous relationship and its evolution (the least funny part because you expose your intimacy). Be careful not to include letters with inappropriate language or sexual content, and avoid sending letters that are too long.

If you have completed everything correctly and sent a check in the correct amount, you will receive your NO1 – Notice of Action – in a few days, which confirms receipt of your file and announces your “Priority Date” (the date your file arrived and not the one of the notice).
You can also follow the evolution on the USCIS website.

From there… you have to be patient! Your NO1 will tell you which center your file will be treated at, and apart from constantly monitoring the progress of the files of this center via mobile applications and community sites on immigration (like visajourney.com, a mine of info), there is nothing to do ! The official deadlines generally announce a wait of 4 or 5 months for this stage, some centers respect them, others don’t. In our case, we found ourselves in a completely overwhelmed center, which transferred a large part of his cases, late, including ours, to another center, when we had just reached 5 months of waiting . As a result, we got our NO2 after 7 months!

And at some point (when you’re at the end of life, slouching on your couch and too discouraged to look what has just beeped your phone):

You will also receive your NO2 by mail. Nothing more to do at that moment, you have to wait (between 2 weeks and a month) that your file is sent to the NVC for the next step.

Categories: Living in the USA, US immigration: CR1 (spouse) Visa

On my way to America [the choice of visa]

When Alan and I met, I lived in Denmark and I honestly hoped to stay there (💔).
On the other hand, I was not super happy with the idea of a super long distance relationship “forever”. Since life is made of choices, I made some which first brought me back to France, then say “Yes! “(Forever!) to him, and to happy for a visa application for the USA.
Contrary to what many people seem to believe, marrying an American gives absolutely no rights or privileges, and certainly not a green card! The fact of being married did not give me more rights than another tourist to stay more than 90 days (with ESTA) on the territory. On the other hand, it offers the possibility to the American citizen to petition for her/his spouse to obtain permanent residency (green card), an immigrant visa CR-1 (for marriages of less than 2 years old) or IR-1.

We first considered a fiancé visa (K-1). A fiancé visa requires about the same procedure (but 3 times faster!) but does not give the same rights at all since it is a nonimmigrant visa. Once the visa beneficiary has arrived in the USA, the couple has 90 days to get married or the foreigner must go back to their country. Once married, you must file for an adjustment of status, which, when it is accepted (yes it can be denied!), will grant you a conditional green card. Unfortunately, it can take between 5 months… to a year, and the alien (foreigner) has, meanwhile, a blurry status that allows them just to stay in the territory but neither to work or go out of the country (because he has no more visa to return afterwards). Obviously I simplify a little, there is the opportunity to apply for a work permit with their adjustment of status application (which takes several months but less than the AOS), and I believe there is also solutions to travel.
But you have understood, this requires, in any case, to stay without working for months! When you have an incarcerated husband, I’ll say that this is not really a viable solution unless you have enough savings to self-maintain for a year.

Given our particular situation, I decided to hire an (American) immigration lawyer. After some research on fiance visas/incarcerated US citizen, he redirected us to the spouse visa. It must be said that we had another difficulty in the mix, because we had started the procedure of marriage in the prison and that it was necessary that the authorization of the Florida Department of Corrections we would obtain would work out with the fiancé visa timeline, and that was not a sure bet, especially in case of complications for the visa.
Another point, in the case of the fiancée visa, the center of attention is rather on the American citizen, whereas in the case of the visa spouse, the attention is more on the future immigrant. It seemed less risky to highlight my history and my empty criminal record instead of his… Just seeing what papers had to be provided concerning his convictions, we were lost facing everything that should have been sent! I still want to say that I know people who have obtained fiancé visas with a US fiance in prison, sometimes for very long sentences (understand: for life). It’s possible. As long as the crime does not fall under IMBRA there is a chance.
There was also the fact that if the fiance visa was denied, it would have been difficult for me to get an ESTA in the future, and we might not have been able to get married at all! My lawyer warned me that there was always the risk, with the spouse visa, that it was denied too and that the same problem arises so I can return to the USA and see Alan, and to be sure we want to take the risk of getting married because “a divorce from abroad is complicated and it’s expensive! “. In our case, we wanted to be married, even if we were never to live on the same continent… or to meet again – but frankly I never agreed to just consider that, I made a blockage on this idea, otherwise I would have died of anxiety even if it was in a corner of my mind at times.

We therefore opted for the CR-1 visa. The required conditions to apply for this visa are:

the couple must be married
the alien spouse must reside abroad
the relationship must be genuine (you need to prove a sincere and durable relationship)
the alien spouse has no criminal record
the US spouse must meet the financial criteria américain remplisse les conditions financières (had earned 25% above the poverty line in the last 3 years) or have a co-sponsor who does.

In our case, we had no other option but to get married in the US, so I had to go for the wedding, then returned to my country. Beware, if it is possible for foreigners who are already in the USA and marry an American, to ask for an adjustment of status there, it is fraud if you deliberately get in the country to get married and try to skip the steps by staying! If you do like me, a wedding on a trip under ESTA and you go back home without overstay (on time – less than 90 days), everything is legal.

The difference between the CR-1 and the IR-1 is the conditional status of the green card for the CR-1. This is a green card valid for two years, for which you must request a withdrawal of the conditions 90 days before its expiry date (and pay fees of course), but if the couple is still married and the alien has not committed a crime, the conditions are withdrawn and he has a permanent green card.

Since we have put together a file for a CR-1/IR-1 visa, this is the one I will detail in my next posts, but the process is very close for a K-1 (almost similar, a step in less).

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