Can I get married online and then file for a spouse visa that way?
A lot of people are asking this because the fiancé visas require you to have met in person
within the two years before you filed for your fiancé visa
Some people have not been able to meet in person unfortunately because of the pandemic and travel bans
and the world being on fire this year and its put a lot of people's relationship plans on hold.
Some people are wondering, can I just marry at a distance and then go ahead and start our visa process?
That's definitely a reasonable question to ask.
Supposedly, there are some people online who have done this. I don't know if that's really true because I've never seen one in person.
What I do want to talk about is the actual law which is what we always come back to as lawyers not what's on the internet that they did successfully.
The government does sometimes make errors. Sometimes people hide things on their cases and
the government didn't know the whole story and didn't get approved but it should've had been.
I would say take those purported stories with a grain of salt because what I do know is what the law says.
There's a law called the Immigration and Nationality Act.
It's part of the US Federal Law and it's the main source of law that we use when we're talking about visa regulations and things like that.
The law provides a really general overview and from there different cases and forms that the government creates and regulations
interpret what the law means. But at a very high level, there is a rule about proxy marriages or distance marriages.
And so this is what it says.
You can Google Immigration and Nationality Act and you will find that what it says in INA 101 A35 which is the definition section
"The term spouse doesn't include a spouse by reason of any marriage ceremony where the contracting parties thereto
are not physically present in the presence of each other
unless the marriage shall have been consummated."
Let's go through that as legally as quickly.
I had to cut it down a little bit and it just said spouse or husband or wife or other things like that.
This is the most important section. You can see the actual content by looking it up online.
In general, they don't consider you two married if you weren't married physically in the presence of each other under the laws.
Of course there are a lot of other laws that have to do with what makes the marriage legally binding.
There might be a few states in the United States that actually allow proxy or distance marriages and a lot of them don't allow that.
Some foreign countries may allow that. The reason that the US does not want to encourage that
in the immigration laws is because there are a lot of concerns with human trafficking.
People being married against their will and being sent to the United States. There are concerns with fraud.
People marrying people they don't know. It seems like a pretty lose standard.
Obviously, we are in a really weird time right now. A lot of people who legitimately would love to be
physically present for their wedding but can't are asking these questions.
As an immigration lawyer, I'm always looking at, is there a way to work around this and is it
in the best interest of my client to try to lawyer this up and make it work.
In this case, we've got this first part of it here. You have to be physically present with each other.
If you're in a situation where you've never met and you can't get the K1 because you haven't met in person,
marrying over Skype or through webcam places is not going to fix this situation because you
are not in each other's presence and you've never been together so you can't have consummated the marriage.
For those of you who aren't aware, consummation of marriage means that you had sexual relations with your partner before.
Let's say you're in a situation in which they weren't physically present at the wedding but they've been present before
and they allegedly consummated their marriage. First of all, as a lawyer I don't know how I would prove that to the government
other than showing that you have been physically in the same location previously. Maybe there's some wiggle room there
if you could find a legally binding online marriage in a state that allowed it or a country that allowed it.
Say the country of your fiancé allows online marriages, potentially you could do it and say our marriage was over there.
My main concern would be that the immigration process takes so long. Say that, "We've consummated our relationship."
Obviously, we don't have evidence of that. That would be weird or we're not gonna show it to the government if we do have evidence of that.
But we're gonna argue that we've been together and that the relationship has been consummated
and this is an online legally binding wedding. I could see a potential there.
Though I've never personally seen a case that that was done in my entire career or heard of another attorney doing that.
Now I'm curious, I'm gonna ask around if anyone's ever tried that.
My concern would be you don't know what the government's going to say about that for another two years potentially.
Two years in some countries where the wait times for interviews are really long.
Say you decide, " We're gonna have this online marriage. We've consummated our marriage. We think this is gonna work."
And then you go through that whole process. They might deny it at the petition stage. But if you get through the petition, it doesn't mean you're okay.
They might deny it at the national visa center stage but it doesn't mean you're okay if you get through the national visa center.
They could still deny you at the very end, at your interview at the US embassy. They could say, "No, this doesn't qualify.
How are you gonna prove you consummated this? We don't think this qualifies under the law."
At which point, your only option would be to go meet in person, marry again and start from the very beginning.
You can't say at the very end, "We're gonna remarry right now and we're still gonna keep our slot here at the end of the interview"
I just think that it's important that people understand what you would be risking if you tried a novel approach to it.
For a vast majority of people waiting a few more months to make sure that they're on very solid legal ground with their immigration case and they don't have that over their head.
It's probably gonna be preferable. There are some people out there in their very specific situation, that would be the way to approach it.
I would suggest you get legal help from an attorney who does that specifically. Us or another firm that's reputable.
That is definitely outside the immigration box. You don't want to hide this fact from immigration
because they'd be very suspicious of you if you had a proxy distance relationship and
it casually came out at the interview They'd be like, "These people are suspicious." You wouldn't want that.