Questions about filing for the CR-1visa for foreign spouse online....

[TenderHearted 39]

Guys, for those of you who have filed for the CR-1 online, can you tell me about the experience, so I know what to expect? I'm not even sure if filing online is better or even appropriate for us, since I live in the US and of course I am right right now (I am a US citizen).

 

For instance, can you start the application, and save progress, without submitting the form? Can you continue to submit evidence after you have submitted the form, and maybe examples of evidence you've submitted? How and when do you pay for it once you are ready? And maybe anything else you might think that is important. Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated.

 

I'm pulling things together to file and doing a lot of review of the CR-1 guides to prepare for it, as me and my fiance have been married for a month and a day, and I want this process to get underway, so we can be with each other full time. She still has 7 weeks here before she has to leave, but I can't hardly bear the fact of her having to go back, although we both know she must (We are going to do this the right way, we aren't "cutting line" and we certainly aren't going to commit visa fraud!).

 

Again, any feedback from you knowledgeable guys would be greatly appreciated.

 

 

[cdndesro 44]

I can only provide some information regarding the online filing in that;

 

1) Yes you can start filling out the i-130 and go back to it.  You can also upload documents and they will be saved but nothing is submitted until you actually hit submit and agree to a few legal things and provide a credit card for the fee. 

2) I have not tried to add additional evidence since filing but in your USCIS account you submit from, there is a button for adding evidence - so my assumption is you can add to it after it has been received and likely until it starts being looked at (ours hasn't been touched yet).

 

I found that it was pretty easy to upload items, fill in the i130 and submit everything and had no issues.  Received NOA1 the same day...now just waiting.  

 

Good Luck

[pushbrk 12,898]

There are various issues with the form, quirks and bugs, but USCIS knows that and deals with it, apparently.  In my opinion, it is so much easier and so much more reliable to simply do it all on paper and send it in the mail.  Everything but the I-130 itself must be on paper first anyway.

[JKLSemicolon 413]

My wife and I had previously filed other paper forms (the I-129F and I-485) before starting over with the I-130 and CR-1 route.

 

Having done things both ways, here are things I appreciated about the online form:

• Payment is immediate when you submit the form (no waiting for checks to be cashed or a charge to appear on your card, etc.)
• The first Notice of Action is also almost immediate (the status appears immediately on your account and the actual NOA form appears within a day)
• Adding notes in the additional information section is easy (there is a dropdown list  to choose what question(s) from the form that you want to add information about)
• For the most part, the interface makes it easy to fill out the form completely and correctly (with a few minor quirks as pushbrk mentions, mainly with items that could be left blank in our case but that still generated warnings that I had to ignore, etc.)
• After submission, I can see the forms and all of my supplemental documents uploaded right there on the account
• No need to use post-it notes, fasteners, and other labels to keep things organized for the reader as I did with the paper submissions
• Save a small amount on the cost of printing and shipping

There were a few challenges that were manageable for me, but that might be cumbersome for some people:

• The 6mb attachment limit is difficult for anything with images, especially if you want to have a high enough resolution for the file to (presumably) be printed by USCIS. I relied on Acrobat Professional for this since I have access to it through work, and saved all of my files as optimized pdfs using JPEG-2000 compression. This required a lot of trial and error with the settings to get the highest image quality possible while still staying under the file limit. In one case I had to break up a file into three parts to be able to upload it without sacrificing quality.
• Because the uploaded files will appear in random order, I ended up making a cover sheet (with petitioner and beneficiary names, A-numbers, and a brief description of the contents) for each PDF file that contained additional evidence (i.e. everything but the passport-style photos, proof of U.S. citizenship, marriage certificate, and I-130A) to make sure that it would be easy to navigate regardless of the order. For that same reason, I added footers to every attachment containing the title and page numbers (E.g. Visit History / Page 1 of N).
• I also spent a lot of time combining pages from separate files into various PDFs that I wanted to upload, arranging page order, etc. to get the digital versions exactly how I wanted them. For a paper submission I could have just printed out individual files and then sorted the pages that way.

All in all, I spent more time trying to get things just right for the online form, but I personally felt that extra time was worth it for me.

[JKLSemicolon 413]

You also asked about evidence.

 

Here's a list of what I submitted. We probably had more than most, because we had originally started the adjustment of status process from a K-1 visa before changing plans and doing the I-130 and CR-1:

1. Joint residence documentation from the time we were living together
2. Joint checking account documents
3. Credit card accounts with my wife as an authorized user
4. Health insurance and life insurance from my employer where my wife has been added
5. Retirement accounts with my wife added as a beneficiary
6. Relationship timeline showing dates and important events since we met
7. Photos from every period of time that we have been together in person since we met, especially when together with our families
8. Table showing all of our in-person visits along with flight itineraries, passport stamps and/or boarding passes from each one
9. Screenshots of WhatsApp call history from the past few months
10. Documentation of the engagement and wedding rings we purchased
11. Wedding photos and other correspondence/documentation related to the wedding arrangements

#2 through 5 were somewhat of a pain since my wife doesn't have a Social Security number (especially the checking account, which took 2 months and countless phone calls), but I persisted because I wanted solid pieces of evidence.

 

USCIS allows you to upload other evidence after the form has been submitted, but they don't guarantee that they will look at it. In our case the only thing I added after the fact was a checking account statement (since the first statement with both of us on the account had not come out yet by the time I sent the initial submission).

[Babu Frik 1,162]

there are lots of threads on evidence submitted.

There's also a very large thread for online filers that will tell you about the process.

 

A lot comes down to how much you trust USPS 😄

 

 

[Babu Frik 1,162]

22 hours ago, JKLSemicolon said:

My wife and I had previously filed other paper forms (the I-129F and I-485) before starting over with the I-130 and CR-1 route.

 

Having done things both ways, here are things I appreciated about the online form:

• Payment is immediate when you submit the form (no waiting for checks to be cashed or a charge to appear on your card, etc.)
• The first Notice of Action is also almost immediate (the status appears immediately on your account and the actual NOA form appears within a day)
• Adding notes in the additional information section is easy (there is a dropdown list  to choose what question(s) from the form that you want to add information about)
• For the most part, the interface makes it easy to fill out the form completely and correctly (with a few minor quirks as pushbrk mentions, mainly with items that could be left blank in our case but that still generated warnings that I had to ignore, etc.)
• After submission, I can see the forms and all of my supplemental documents uploaded right there on the account
• No need to use post-it notes, fasteners, and other labels to keep things organized for the reader as I did with the paper submissions
• Save a small amount on the cost of printing and shipping

There were a few challenges that were manageable for me, but that might be cumbersome for some people:

• The 6mb attachment limit is difficult for anything with images, especially if you want to have a high enough resolution for the file to (presumably) be printed by USCIS. I relied on Acrobat Professional for this since I have access to it through work, and saved all of my files as optimized pdfs using JPEG-2000 compression. This required a lot of trial and error with the settings to get the highest image quality possible while still staying under the file limit. In one case I had to break up a file into three parts to be able to upload it without sacrificing quality.
• Because the uploaded files will appear in random order, I ended up making a cover sheet (with petitioner and beneficiary names, A-numbers, and a brief description of the contents) for each PDF file that contained additional evidence (i.e. everything but the passport-style photos, proof of U.S. citizenship, marriage certificate, and I-130A) to make sure that it would be easy to navigate regardless of the order. For that same reason, I added footers to every attachment containing the title and page numbers (E.g. Visit History / Page 1 of N).
• I also spent a lot of time combining pages from separate files into various PDFs that I wanted to upload, arranging page order, etc. to get the digital versions exactly how I wanted them. For a paper submission I could have just printed out individual files and then sorted the pages that way.

All in all, I spent more time trying to get things just right for the online form, but I personally felt that extra time was worth it for me.

I uploaded lots of images and didn't have any issues, saved everything as PDF

it's not 6mb total, it's 6mb each file, I split up photographs into 4 files

 

6mb is a lot more generous than the 2mb NVC gives you.

 

But all that extra time isn't exactly necessary, although I'm not saying you did anything wrong, if you felt more confident doing it then go for it.

I didn't do all that and got approved no problem.

 

Remember, everything is digitized anyway, so they're going to scan it and upload it and that's what gets reviewed.

Edited December 13, 2020 by Babu Frik

[Babu Frik 1,162]

BTW, NVC is digital only when you get to that part

[TenderHearted 39]

On 12/11/2020 at 7:27 PM, pushbrk said:

There are various issues with the form, quirks and bugs, but USCIS knows that and deals with it, apparently.  In my opinion, it is so much easier and so much more reliable to simply do it all on paper and send it in the mail.  Everything but the I-130 itself must be on paper first anyway.

Quite honestly, I probably will be doing it via the "paper trail" way, but I had to ask what the experiences of online filing was like. It kind of only makes sense, at least IMHO, to go this route.