Fiancée K1 Visa

Hi Friends,
Recently i came across this interesting Visa (Fiancée Visa) or K1 Visa..

The K1 visa requirements are simple. You must be a US citizen. Lawful permanent resident "green card" holders of the United States are not allowed to obtain fiancée visas. Both you and your fiancée must be free to marry. This means that if either of you has been married previously, you are either divorced, widowed or the marriage was annulled. You must have met your fiancée in person within the previous two years. If your fiancée lives in a developing country she cannot legally obtain a visitor visa to meet you in the U.S. This means that you must travel outside the US to meet your fiancée. Finally, there is a minimum income requirement for the fiancée visa petitioner.

You may have heard that 40% of the K1 visa petitions filed never result in a visa being issued. From what other immigration attorneys have told us, we believe this to be true. Notice that we used the words "not approved," and not the word "denied". This is because both the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services ("USCIS", formerly the "INS" - Immigration and Naturalization Service) and the U.S. Consulates rarely turn down a K1 visa petition or application request if the requirements mentioned above are met.

What happens instead is that the BCIS finds some technical error or omission in the paperwork submitted to them. Then, after several months they will send you a form letter telling you what you did wrong. Very often, when you submit the required correction, they will again wait several months and again return the visa forms to you with another cover-sheet informing you of a second minor error or omission.

When (and if) your approved K 1 visa petition reaches the U.S. Consulate at the U.S. Embassy handling the visa for your fiancée's country, you still are not home free. If the consular officer who interviews your fiancée can get her to give an answer to one of his or her many questions which is different from the information you submitted in your petition package, the officer can send your entire BCIS-approved petition package back to the BCIS in the U.S. for "investigation". The minimum delay from this action in getting your fiancée's visa issued is six months. Needless to say, if your fiancée does not know all about your background and because she will naturally be nervous during her interview, it is not too difficult to get her to give the wrong answer to one of the questions.

As you can see from the above, neither the BCIS nor the U.S. consular officers want to risk taking the political heat which could result from their turndown of an immigrant petition. However, if they can find an excuse to return it for correction or investigation, they are perfectly within their rights and not subject to criticism. In fact, it is their duty to find problems and return cases.

What usually happens in this situation is that one or both of you will give up. Unfortunately, the usual result of delays is that the fiancée becomes convinced that her American fiancé is not serious about marrying her and she ends the engagement. She probably knows of someone whose fiancé used our services to obtain a fiancée visa. She knows that the foreign wife received her fiancée visa quickly and efficiently and she wonders why you cannot do the same. Our normal processing timeline from the BCIS receipt date until visa issuance depends on the country of residence of your fiancée and the state in which you reside. When a particular BCIS Service Center or U.S. Consulate gets behind in their work, the K1 visa processing time can increase. When this occurs we will let you know. The bottom line is that however long it takes us to obtain your fiancée visa, we believe it would take you or anyone else much longer.

When your fiancée receives her fiancée visa, she has six months to enter the U.S. After her arrival in the U.S., you have 90 days to marry her or you must send your fiancée back to her home country. There is no legal way to extend the 90-day limit. While she is in the U.S. you are completely responsible for her financially. If for any reason you do not marry her and she departs the U.S. within the 90 days, she will not be precluded from coming to the U.S. in the future on another K1 visa and you will not be precluded from again bringing her or another foreign fiancée to the U.S. on a K1 visa. Although repeated fiancée visa petitions raise the suspicions of the BCIS, we obtain dozens of "second" and even some "third" fiancée visas every year.