This is a question that has been asked about eight times in the Facebook group
this week alone. We thought we need a video about this because this is a tough question. We're also getting
tons of questions about it at consultations. When your fiancé petition, your I129F,
or your I130 is pending, are you allowed to visit the United States as a visitor
with your fiancé or your spouse? This is a huge
question. People have been separated for a long time. The cases are taking a very long time
to process. In order to be able to live with the processing times that we're currently seeing
in many cases of over a year, many people are just trying to figure out how can I see
the person I love? I don't want to be separated physically that long. This is sort
of a multi-part answer. There's a little bit of nuance here which I know is sometimes difficult to
explain but I'm going to do my best to explain the different main scenarios we see
and what would apply to you specifically. The first thing you have to understand about
immigration is that there are two types of intentions that you can have legally when you
enter the United States. There's immigrant intent and then there's
non-immigrant intent. Immigrant intent is when you got your bags,
you're showing up at the airport, you're moving to America. You're staying you want to live and work here indefinitely.
You have the intent of an immigrant. To become
an immigrant to America. Non-immigrant intent is when you're coming to the US to do something
specific like you want to visit Disney World or you want to go to college or you want to
visit and go on vacation or visit some relatives or something like that. Maybe you have a
temporary job or something like that.
There are many types of non-immigrant intent. But the basic concept is that you're coming for a
specific purpose and you're intending to leave the United States. Why does this matter? What does
this have anything to do with what we're talking about? The question gets a little
bit tricky when we're talking about situations where people are already filing as fiancés
or spouses of US citizens because in general if you are married to a US citizen or you're
engaged to a US citizen and you've already filed documentation with the US government saying,
"I intend to permanently move to the United States." In some ways you've expressed that you have
immigrant intent because you've actually said, "I plan to move to the United States."
That doesn't necessarily mean that you cannot visit. It just makes it harder and it makes it
a little bit riskier. What is allowed is if you have filed for a fiancé case or a spouse case and
it's pending, you can have the intent to-- when my fiancé visa case is completed or when my spouse
visa case is completed, at that point I'm going to have immigrant intent to move to the United States
but for now, I have non-immigrant intent to visit in the meantime. That's how those
two things are co-exist. That's possible that you [are] on vacation
but I do have a long-term plan to immigrate to the United States.
People typically who are either doing a fiancé visa or a spouse visa, they can visit the
United States if they have a way to do so and if the officer that inspects them at the border or
at the airport believes them that they have non-immigrant intent on this visit.
It's definitely possible that you get off the plane, you go through customs and the
customs officer says, "I don't believe that you're gonna leave after three weeks or two
months or whenever you've planned to stay. I think you're gonna try to stay here."
It's possible that they can turn you back for that reason.
As long as you're not lying to them, that's not going to hurt your fiancé visa or your
spouse visa, that just means you couldn't visit while that's pending. That's very possible.
Hopefully, this is all making sense to you.
This is like a long answer but I know everyone wanted to know so we had to make a video for it.
But one thing I want to point out is that for people from a lot of countries, it's just
hard to visit the United States anyway. If you happen to be from a country that is in a
typically pretty good position economically, your country might participate in the visa
waiver program which means that if you don't have a serious criminal history, you
can fill out the ESTA documents and you can just visit the US for 90 days in most cases.
Typically the people who can come and visit are if you already have a tourist visa.
If you're from a country that you can't get in on visa waiver, you don't have a tourist visa,
you can try applying for a tourist visa but those are typically denied when you try for
a tourist visa from a country that has a high rate of overstays of tourist visas.
A lot of countries in Latin America or just less developed areas of the world where
the US government is suspicious that you'll probably want to stay rather than going back home
just because a lot of people from your country have done that in the past. You might not
be able to visit simply because you don't have a way to get any kind of non-immigrant permission
to come and visit while you're waiting for your case. You simply have to wait.
You can see why this is such a complicated situation.
Sometimes people asking this question are in the United
States and they're applying for adjustment of status. They have an I-130 but they've also
applied for a green card at the same time. They cannot leave the United States and
go abroad and come back unless they have advanced parole which is like a travel permit
until you have that temporary travel authorization. If you leave, you're going to
abandon your case entirely and have to start over outside of the United States.
Sometimes that issue gets rolled in there too and I just want to make sure that if you're listening
to this and that's your situation please know that does not mean that you are allowed to travel
while that's pending. Every situation is very different. Hopefully that gives you all
some more perspective on that question. I'm just trying to get the truth out
there as usual for some of these important topics so you guys can visit each other.