How Long Will I Have To Wait For My Green Card?
Normally, immediately at the conclusion of your green card interview you will know if the interview was successful or not. At the end of the interview USCIS officer will tell you if he or she is approving your application and, if so, he or she will provide you what is called a Notice of Approval (I-797). A few weeks later you will receive your official USCIS letter and green card in the mail.
Finding out whether or not you or your spouse will be receiving a green card immediately following the interview spares both of you an agonizing period of stressful waiting. There is nothing more stressful than simply waiting around for a test result, a verdict, or decision from a USCIS officer.
There are some occasions, however, that do in fact cause the couples to have to wait around for the decision of the USCIS. This delay can be caused because the U.S. citizen or foreign spouse was unable to provide adequate proof or evidence at the interview regarding a particular issue. If, for example, the interviewing officer asks the U.S. citizen if he shares a joint bank accounts with his spouse and is told yes, but the U.S citizen is unable to provide any documentation proving the existence of that account then there is going to be a delay.
In most cases these delays could have been averted if only the married couple had spent a little bit of time organizing the paper trail of their marriage before the interview. Since there is no standard set of questions that each USCIS officer is required to follow at every interview, you have to be prepared to provide documentation for anything that you have claimed on the paperwork you submitted or anything you might say at the interview.
If the USCIS officer asks you what sort of activities you and your spouse do together and you claim that both of you joined the local gym or enrolled in a class together, you had better be prepared to provide the enrollment form showing both of your names. If you are unable to prove something you might have claimed in response to a question, you will eventually have to provide that proof and this means that you will not be leaving the interview with a Notice of Approval.
The frustrating part of the delay is that is could have very easily been avoided with even a minimum amount of preparation and legwork in the days before the interview.
There is only one thing worse than leaving the green card interview without a decision being made by the interviewing officer: Being told that the green card application has been denied. In such a case, a written explanation would be provided covering the reasons for the denial of the application. Depending on the reason for the denial, the U.S citizen in the marriage, if deemed to be a participant in a marriage scam, could be looking at a felony charges for fraud and the foreign spouse would probably be given notice to depart the United States.
While there is no requirement that any marriage-based green card applicant needs to hire an immigration attorney to assist him or her through the application process, once there is a charge of marriage fraud, or any other kind of illegality, it would be highly recommended to secure the services of one. The potential consequences are simply too severe to go up against an army of USCIS lawyers alone.
