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- Can I get married in the U.S.
if I'm married here in the Philippines,
but I've been separated for 12 years?
You may be able to get married, but the USCIS
and Department of State is not going to accept that
as a legal marriage.
In order to legally marry and receive an immigration benefit
with USCIS and Department of State,
you have to be legally married.
And in order to do that,
you have to prove that all prior marriages
were legally terminated.
Now, you stated Philippines,
so if you're married in the Philippines,
they don't recognize divorce,
so you're gonna have to provide an annulment document
or a death certificate, something like that.
But to answer your question,
you need to get that prior marriage annulled
even though you've been separated for 12 years.
And if you have no contact with your ex,
you can still file for an annulment,
and you can process that without the other person.
Now, you'll probably need to consult with a family attorney
in the Philippines to do that.
But, anyway, you can get married in the U.S.,
they wouldn't know about it, we don't have a marriage record
in the United States like they have in the Philippines
with the PSA, that's Philippine Statistics Authority.
But I wouldn't bother with that, I wouldn't do that.
Just get it annulled,
and then you can file for a fiance visa,
or file for a spouse visa after you marry.
- Yeah, you know, I'll spend a minute on this one
'cause it's important.
You don't say if you're in the U.S. already or not.
If you're trying to come here on a spouse visa or something,
you'll never get gonna get here
because they're gonna require you
to get a certificate of no marriage,
commonly called a CENOMAR,
bring that to the embassy with you for your interview,
and obviously you can't produce that,
you're not gonna get a visa to even get here.
But if you're already here on some other kind of visa,
tourist visa or something, and you think,
oh, I'll just go get married, they won't know,
you might be right.
You certainly could get married here
because we don't check marriage registries,
we take your work for it.
If you say you're divorced, we'll let you get married.
But, and I'm sure that people have probably
gotten away with that,
but you really don't wanna go down that road
because once you commit that kind of fraud,
even if eventually down the road years from now,
you become a citizen, all of that can be taken away
and you're deported, if it's ever discovered
that you lied for any immigration benefit.
And it does happen.
It happens many times a year.
It seems to be, in fact, I think the current administration
has assembled a special team
to look into past frauds and so on.
But even before the current administration,
it has happened with other administrations,
probably every administration,
where you come up on the radar screen for some reason,
probably wouldn't be for this, but for some reason.
They start investigating your past,
they find that you lied for an immigration,
could be 20 years ago, and it has absolutely happened
to people who have been here 20 plus years.
They've built a life, and all of a sudden,
a lie is found on some past immigration benefit,
like a Green Card application,
and they get their citizenship stripped away
and deported back to a country they haven't seen
in 20, 30 years.
So, it can and absolutely does happen.
So don't, it's very tempting, annulments are expensive
and can take up to a couple of years in the Philippines,
so it's very tempting for people
to try to end-run around this rule,
go get married in a third country, we've seen that one,
Try and to a proxy marriage, we've seen that one.
You probably won't get away with it,
and even if you do,
you're gonna be looking over your shoulder
the rest of your life.
Our advice is just don't do it.
You might talk to an attorney,
they may have another option for you
that we're not aware of,
but just to ignore that marriage from 12 years ago
is not gonna be in your best interest.
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