The First Step: Petition Application

By Victoria

The K-1 Visa process actually starts with the U.S. citizen filing a petition application on behalf of the non-citizen fiancé. So, recently I printed out the main Form I-129F, plus the instructions, plus Form G-1145 to request email confirmation of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) accepting my petition. Form G-1145 is really not much more than a box to put in my email address, which you would think could easily be included in Form I-129F itself, but whatever...they can make more paperwork for themselves if they want. 

I haven't actually filled out the form(s) yet, but I did take a highlighter and go through the Form I-129F instructions. The major takeaways are:

1. Submit evidence of my U.S. citizenship with the application. For evidence of citizenship, I can either submit a copy of my birth certificate or a copy of my passport...but I'd have to copy every single page of the passport, which just sounds like a pain to me, so I had my parents mail me my birth certificate. (Side note: There's a letter missing from my mom's name on the certificate: "Sana" instead of "Sanae." Whoops.)
2. Submit evidence of my relationship with Colin. The specific requirement is that we must have met in person within the past 2 years (unless you can prove that meeting in person would cause undue hardship on the involved parties OR your religion/culture doesn't permit meeting your fiancé before marriage). We easily fit this requirement, since Colin has been over here 3 times already (soon to be 4) and I've been over there 2 times. We can submit any combination of photos together, plane tickets, flight itineraries, and passport pages (with tourist visa stamps). We would have saved more of our actual plane tickets if we'd known we would need them, but oh well.
3. Submit evidence that we intend to marry within 90 days on the K-1; this evidence "may include a statement of intent to marry." This, quite honestly, is a ridiculously useless requirement, because from what I can gather, the statement of intent is nothing more than a signed piece of paper saying "I, [name], intend to marry [fiancé name] within 90 days of his arrival on the K-1 Visa." Isn't that obvious given the fact I'm submitting this petition to begin with??
4. Submit two completed Form G-325A (more forms, surprise), one each for the citizen and non-citizen, with biographic information.
5. Submit passport-style photos of both the U.S. citizen and the non-citizen fiancé. We'll get these done when Colin is here in April.

Oh, and of course there's the $340 filing fee...can't forget that, can we? The first of many immigration fees.

I briefly mentioned in an earlier post that we won't be submitting Form I-129F until the end of April. Colin is visiting me from April 3 to April 23 (!), and we're waiting to submit until he's back in Northern Ireland. We can't submit earlier because we found out the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)/Customs and Border Protection (CBP) can view it as immigration fraud if you submit an immigration application and then try to visit the country: Knowing that you're interested in immigration, they might suspect that you're actually trying to illegally immigrate under your tourist visit. Because Colin had already booked his trip before we found out this information, we decided not to submit until after Colin is out of the States again. This will give us time to fill out the application together and also avoid any possible issues with DHS. It also means that Colin can't come back into the U.S. until he's awarded his visa, at which point he'll enter the country permanently anyway. I can still go over to NI to visit him, though.

We're getting closer to the official starting line of this visa process. Everything starts at the end of next month!