Thoughts After Successful Adjustment of Status

[Lattimore 1]

My wife recently received her green card from an adjustment of status application. Greatly appreciated everyone's help with questions I posed over the few months, and I thought I'd post a couple thoughts of my own now that this is all over, in case they help anybody else out in the future:

1. We hired a lawyer for our application, and I can't stress enough how glad I am that we did. I know many on VisaJourney are DIYers, and I greatly admire all of you for your fortitude in going through this without a lawyer, but I would advise anybody starting out on an adjustment of status journey to strongly consider hiring a legal professional, especially if your case is at all unusual.

If you do hire a lawyer be sure to shop around, and check out reviews on sites like avvo.com, google reviews, etc. The first lawyer we met with wanted 2500 USD. We almost hired him, but on the advice of my father (who is a lawyer) did a bit more research, and eventually found a very highly rated small firm that charged only 2000. Met with them in person, and was thrilled with their level of attention and care, and hired them. Many lawyers will want a fee if you meet in person, as did ours, but ours was willing to deduct the fee from the charge if we decided to engage their services, which we did.

I'm sure my opinion regarding lawyers would be different if we had only found an average one, but having an excellent lawyer like ours was helpful in so many ways. I'm self-employed, and while my income is over the I-864 limit, my accounting system is a bit of a mess. Originally thought this might mean that USCIS would ask me to add a joint sponsor, which would have been unfair and was something I did not want to do, but our lawyer assured me that this would be OK and helped come up with a plan to organize my paperwork to show income. She was also very helpful regarding our travel out of the country (see below), and in making sure everything was in order.

Perhaps most importantly, as someone who is self-employed, my time literally is money, and while it's not fun to pay 2000 dollars for something we may have been able to do alone, by the time you factor in the time and risk savings, the cost really was quite reasonable.

2. It is possible to travel out of the country (with the advance parole card of course), even for long periods of time, while awaiting the green card interview notice. I posed a question earlier this year about how long we could return to my wife's home country to visit her family and help them after she received her advance parole card. As things turned out, we had been back in her home country for a little over two months when we received a notice stating that our interview was scheduled for the end of spring. My wife was caring for one of her sick relatives on a daily basis, and us leaving would have really been a problem for her family, so our lawyer helped us explain this to Immigration and the appointment was rescheduled--in the end we were able to spend a bit over four months in her home country, which was wonderful for her family and sick relative. I obviously can't guarantee that such a long stay would be issue-free for everyone, but at least in our case there were no obvious issues raised about this, either at the border or in the interview. In terms of the border, I think it helped that I was traveling with my wife when we reentered the country.

I suppose the only caveat to the above is that we did have a very good reason to spend so much time out of the country while awaiting (and rescheduling) the interview, but my sense is things may have still been OK even if we had just been going over to visit family (although obviously we would have had to come back for the first interview).

[TBoneTX 45,288]

What a helpful, thoughtful write-up.

*** Thread is moved from the "AOS from WS&T Visas" main forum to the Case Progress subforum. ***