I am screwed

[Sergi9 110]

Your wife tried to enter the US with her B2 while an I-130 petition was pending. Not a problem. The CBP officer assumed that she intended to stay and . . . my educated guess . . . took her into "secondary inspection" meaning into a separate room and questioned her. When all was said and done he allowed your wife to withdraw her petition to enter and send her back to Australia.

Up to this point you do not have a problem.

You admitted to us that you were lying, but many people lie about things and don't get caught. It's like smoking pot. You don't get in trouble for smoking pot in the U.S.; you only get in trouble if you get caught smoking pot. Thus, your lying only becomes a problem if you got caught, formally. It therefore all depends on what happened in secondary inspection, where the CBP officer would enter findings into the computer. If you got lucky, he did not establish misrepresentation and simply refused her entry based on his suspicion, which is his right. That would fit nicely with the offer to withdraw instead of formally refusing her entry.

The worst case scenario would be if he questioned your wife and she then admitted on having planed to stay in the US and adjust status. That would indeed be misrepresentation, likely a material one. It becomes material when the fact in question has an outcome on the action, which this certainly did: the assumption of immigration intent caused the refusal of admission.

All of this is speculation though, so what really matters is if there's any I-212 entry in the passport. If it's not, you most likely won't have a problem in the CR-1 process. Again, lying is bad***, but admittance of having lied is oftentimes worse.

Footnote***:

"Lying is bad."

Nazi commander enters ship and ask the Captain if there are any Jews on board. Captain lies, Jews are not found and thus don't get killed. Was his lie bad although it saved the Jews' lives? To be able to answer that, you need to read up on Kant's Categorical Imperative. I did. In fact, I wrote a 34-page paper on it.

I agree with the general premise of this post, of course we will not know the outcome for some time. I believe he could also charge her with misrepresentation based on what appears to have happened here, not that she intended to AOS here as it was stated in original post that she intended to stay here and wait for the interview. The misrepresentation here was she lied about the purpose of her stay here. It sounds like the OP and his fiance concocted some fabricated purpose of her visit here and then when the CBP official detected deception he called the OP and he lied sticking to the original story after the Fiance cracked or she later cracked during more questioning.

Me thinks this type of thing has a tendency to annoy CBP as they are human too an no one likes someone trying to pull one over on you. But there is always the chance it happened close to the CBP officials end of shift and he/she didn't want to stay late and do the paperwork..

Good luck to the OP and keep your fingers crossed.