Arrived

By Victoria

Just a quick update -- USPS tracking confirms that our petition package arrived at the USCIS Dallas lockbox facility (fancy name for a P.O. Box) on Saturday morning (5/10)!

I don't think I will hear anything from USCIS to confirm receipt, so I'll have to wait until they actually review the contents and make a decision before I receive a notification.

By the way, I'm sure you've noticed that these blog posts have been written almost entirely by me so far...that will change once the visa application gets forwarded to the U.S. Consulate in Belfast, at which point all the hard work has to be done by Colin for his interview(s) and further evidence submission. You'll be hearing more from him on that side of the process once we get there.

UPDATE:
They actually did sent me a confirmation of receipt. Since I submitted form G-1145 for electronic notification, I got both a text message and an email saying that the Dallas center officially received our packet on May 15. I also received a letter of confirmation stating the same thing a few days later via snail mail. And here I thought the electronic notification option was meant to save paper...

PETITION SUBMITTED!

Our K-1 petition application is now officially in the mail!!

The application goes to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services lockbox facility in Dallas, Texas for processing. Once approved, it's sent to the National Visa Center, where it goes through another round of processing and approval. From there, the case is sent to the U.S. Consulate in Belfast, Northern Ireland; representatives there will contact Colin to continue the K-1 visa process.

Don't hold your breaths for this initial petition to be processed and approved too quickly, though...the Federal Government is not known for its speed. I'm hoping it wouldn't take more than a month to hear about the status of the case from Dallas, but honestly, who knows. Fingers crossed!

Organizing the Petition Submission

By Victoria

There are a lot of components to this initial petition application, so I've had to consider how I was going to put it all together without it being a jumble of random papers. I want to make sure these documents are as easy to follow and check off the checklist for the Government reviewer(s) as possible. To show off my organizational prowess (and in case anyone reading this needs this information in the future...), I'll detail how I packaged the contents.

To start off, I decided to break it into three different packets. I went to Target and bought some clear report covers -- the kind that have a clip binding along the side so you can flip through the papers inside. I also bought a package of tab dividers for one of the packets, which I'll explain later. Since the Government probably doesn't care about the aesthetics THAT much, and because I'm never going to see these things again, I didn't invest much into my supplies: all told, I spent about $2-3 on the report covers and dividers.

The three packets are 1) Forms; 2) Supplementary Documents, and 3) Evidence of Meeting in Person.

Packet 1: Forms

There are four forms that must be submitted for the petition application:

1. G-1145 (Electronic Notification of Acceptance of Application/Petition)
2. I-129F (Petition for Alien Fiance)
3. G-325A for the Petitioner (Biographical Form)
4. G-325A for the Alien Fiance (Biographical Form) 

However, I moved the two G-325A forms to the second packet (which, again, I'll explain later). I-129F is the main/major form; the instructions for it specifically state that G-1145 should be clipped to the front of I-129F, so I clipped the two together inside the report binder.

Packet 2: Supplementary Documents

As stated on the cover, the documents I included in this packet are:

1. Petitioner Proof of Citizenship (my birth certificate, front and back)
2. Statements of Intent to Marry (one letter each from me and Colin)
3. Petitioner G-325A with Passport Photo
4. Fiance G-325A with Passport Photo

These are where my divider tabs come in. Because the supplementary documents are so varied and not necessarily similar in topic, I decided they needed a little more internal organization. I just divided this packet into three, based on the groupings of documents.

Tab 1 has my birth certificate to prove my U.S. citizenship. The instructions state that the front and back of the birth certificate must be included, so I made copies of both sides, even though there's nothing on the back of my certificate.

Tab 2 has two letters, one each signed by me and Colin, that state our intents to marry each other within 90 days of Colin's arrival in the U.S. on the K-1 Visa. They're basically the same letter, just with the ordering of the names and some pronouns altered. They're in business format, so we also have our names and addresses at the top of each letter.

Tab 3 has two copies of biographical form G-325A, one each for me and Colin. I originally intended for this section to just hold our passport-style photos (which is another requirement), but I couldn't figure out how to put the photos in there without them getting bent by the binding or just clipping them to a blank piece of paper to keep them from floating around. I did a little digging online and saw that others had attached their passport photos to the G-325A forms, which made so much more sense to me. Originally I had the G-325A forms in Packet 1 (Forms), but I still consider the passport photos to be supplementary documents and not quite right for the forms packet (they're listed in the instructions as a requirement unto themselves, not necessarily part of the G-325), so I moved the G-325A forms out of Packet 1 and into Packet 2 to stay with the photos. The forms are technically still supplementary, and since I have everything clearly listed on the front covers, I figure the bio forms will still be easy to find for the reviewers.

Packet 3: Evidence

I put the evidence of our relationship into a separate packet just because we have a lot more documentation for this requirement than all the other ones in Packet 2. The instructions give you quite a few options for presenting evidence of your relationship, so this is how I structured and presented ours:

1. Opening formal statement of all dates on which we have met/visited each other, signed by me
2. Internal cover pages for each meeting, followed by:
1. Printed official flight itinerary for the visit
2. One representative photo from the visit

We've met six times in the past two years, so that adds up to quite a few pages. (I blocked out some of the info in the example photos because that stuff doesn't need to be publicly available on the Internet.) I chose the photos based on how much identifiable background they contain, so it doesn't look like they could've been taken all at once or set up in a studio. The one pictured above is a bad example of this (whoops), but the others have as much setting in the background as I could find. The final evidence photo, from Colin's recent April visit, has the Jefferson Memorial in the background -- and that's about as identifiable as you can get.

So there you have it! The way I've organized all the papers might be overkill, but I'm so paranoid about this getting approved the first time that I want to make sure it's absolutely as clear and obvious as possible. No Government reviewer is going to open my submission, shuffle through a pile of papers, and claim they couldn't find one of the requirements!