Suppose you have been born on individual foreign land and you are a person who wedded a U.S. citizen and is already staying or residing in the United States. In that case, your marriage may be eligible for a residency permit or green card (U.S. permanent legal residence). You may file for one through a procedure called adjustment of status.
Nevertheless, you must first ensure that you are qualified for a marriage-based residency permit and that you are qualified to apply for adjustment of status through marriage by altering your status. If that’s the case, we’ll provide you with some pointers on how to start preparing your marriage-based request.
Qualification for a Green Card via Marriage
Getting married to a US citizen qualifies you as an “immediate relative,” making you qualified for a US green card as soon as you complete the application procedure.
In comparison this with the scenario of “preference relatives,” who encounter numerical restrictions on the number of green cards issued each year and must therefore wait numerous years once their partner starts the immigration process before they could even progress and prepare for the green card or adjustment of status through marriage timeline premised on one‘s “priority date.”
To be qualified for adjustment of status through marriage, your wedding must be legally lawful in the state where you were wedded. Some states in the United States, for instance, forbid weddings between juveniles or persons who are blood relatives.
Adapting Status Increases Your Qualifications to Request for a Green Card
Suppose you overstayed your visa in the United States. In that case, there is some good news: While individuals in most visa classifications who have completed this are not all qualified for adjustment of status (and must therefore extend for their visa through consular handling in their home nation), wedding to a US citizen effectively cancels the outstay problem, and you can extend for adjustment of status through marriage notwithstanding the time you were out of status.
As a fact, you’ll gain a twofold advantage by doing so, since if you applied via consular clearance and your term of illegal stay in the United States was three months or longer, you’d be ineligible for adjustment of status through marriage for several years.
In other terms, if your illegal stay were more than three months but much less than one year, you would be barred from returning to the United States for 3 years; and you’d be barred from returning to the United States for 10 years if your illegal stay was longer than 365 days.
AOS Interview
After USCIS has approved your request and the immigrant spouse has completed a biometrics session, you will both be obliged to visit an AOS assessment. The officer from USCIS will inquire about fundamental facts in your application and inquiries concerning your marriage.
You have the option of hiring a lawyer to represent you during this meeting if you so want. After completion and filing the paperwork, your adjustment of status through marriage is approved.
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