I-129F Sanity Check Prior to Filing

[Churros 1]

Hey all, I'm about to file our I-129F. At the advice of a lot of people on reddit we followed the S+Y K1 Visa Journey videos.

I have met my fiancée 4 times in total, all of which are within the last 2 years.

 

She is from Peru and I'm not sure whether that's considered a high fraud country, though I'm assuming being in LATAM it is.

 

Our packet shakes out to be about 95 pages organized like this:

 

Passport Photos

G-1450

G-1145

Cover Letter

Table of Contents

I-129F

Question 54 supplement (1 page)

Photocopy of hers and my passport stamps and bio pages

Visit 1

--boarding passes or receipts if boarding passes aren't available

--hotel receipts

--photos (6 with landmarks)

Visit 2

--boarding passes or receipts if boarding passes aren't available

--hotel receipts

--photos (6 total some landmarks, x2 screenshots of social media posts with photos from this meeting one from hers one from mine)

Visit 3

--boarding passes or receipts if boarding passes aren't available

--hotel receipt

--photos (3 short visit)

Visit 4

--boarding passes or receipts if boarding passes aren't available

--hotel receipts

--photos (12 total spanning 6 months including with her family and mine, her wearing engagement ring and a photo of both of our closed passports with boarding passes sticking out, our names and destinations are visible, but no date).

Engagement ring receipt

Our letters of intent

 

Is this too much? If Peru is considered high fraud I would think that I should front-load evidence, right?

Our service center should be California.

 

Thank you so much in advance, this website is an incredible resource.

[hplusj 135]

Looks comprehensive, just a few things I would suggest, to make the USCIS processing as expedient as possible:

 

- Review https://www.uscis.gov/forms/filing-guidance/tips-for-filing-forms-by-mail for recommendations on filing order and methods.  For the lockbox I did sticky tabs, but made them the restickable kind and put them along the bottoms of the pages, per USCIS request.  With your amount of paperwork, this might help in segmenting the supporting docs by trip.

 

- Consider providing evidence of legitimacy of bone fide relationship separate from evidence of travel.  That's a question I keep hearing coming out of the visa interview: where/when did you two meet?  If your evidence starts with travel, you're missing the part of the application where it explains how you got to that point.  For us, it was a lot of Discord screenshots since we met online.  For one page of supporting evidence I picked a random month from each year and shared all the timestamps for Discord calls we did together, showing the length of the call.  I provided the math at the bottom for perspective: each month drawn, we had on average spent 15% of the full time in a call together.  That's 30-31 days of 24 hour cycles.  Every couple is different in proving how they got to the point where they needed and wanted to travel to each other.  Giving that background in a section prior to the travel, fleshes it out.

 

-Do you have I-94s for any of the trips?  We included some boarding passes for domestic travel once he was in the US, but the entry/exits to the US I found were easier justified with a I-94. https://i94.cbp.dhs.gov/I94/#/recent-search

 

-Make sure all submitted evidence aside from the original passport photos are scanned to 8 1/2 x 11 letter size pages: one sided, and clear.

 

-Make sure letters of intent are signed by their respective parties.

 

That's my two cents.  Best of luck!

 

edit: also, hard to say which service center you'll be assigned.  I would've thought I'd be Nebraska but my understanding is from the USCIS lockbox in Texas, the workload shared between service centers is what dictates which one gets your case, not location proximity.

 

Edited April 15 by hplusj

[aureliano 3]

My fiance is from Peru and we recently had our I-129F approved in less than 4 months.
Just wanted to list some things that you probably already know.

• My understanding is you need to include every single page of the passport, even blank pages
• The packaging can make a difference. I originally had all of our documents in a binder, in plastic sleeves. I did one consult with a lawyer who told me it couldn't be processed like that, because they want to scan everything, and that they would throw it away. I then arranged it to be individual sheets of paper, with paperclips.

Good luck, your case sounds very solid!

Edited April 16 by aureliano

[hplusj 135]

On 4/16/2024 at 8:43 AM, aureliano said:

My fiance is from Peru and we recently had our I-129F approved in less than 4 months.
Just wanted to list some things that you probably already know.

• My understanding is you need to include every single page of the passport, even blank pages
• The packaging can make a difference. I originally had all of our documents in a binder, in plastic sleeves. I did one consult with a lawyer who told me it couldn't be processed like that, because they want to scan everything, and that they would throw it away. I then arranged it to be individual sheets of paper, with paperclips.

Good luck, your case sounds very solid!

 

I don't think that's accurate, the blank pages to a passport are not needed.  In fact, for ours I neglected to even include my fiance's visa stamp.  The I94 served as proof of travel.  They simply want a government issued ID, which the bio page of a passport provides.

 

Packaging though ABSOLUTELY makes a difference, and I'm sure aureliano agrees.  We were both very lucky to have such great turnaround on the petitions and a big part of this is for all petitioners to be conscientious of how they package their paperwork.  Adding sleeves, binders, staples ALL adds time to case filing, and if everyone added these things then it would drastically slow up the number of cases processed per day.  Keep packaging as minimal as possible, follow USCIS instructions.  It's the kind thing to do in order to keep the processing time down for all.

[Churros 1]

5 minutes ago, hplusj said:

 

I don't think that's accurate, the blank pages to a passport are not needed.  In fact, for ours I neglected to even include my fiance's visa stamp.  The I94 served as proof of travel.  They simply want a government issued ID, which the bio page of a passport provides.

 

Packaging though ABSOLUTELY makes a difference, and I'm sure aureliano agrees.  We were both very lucky to have such great turnaround on the petitions and a big part of this is for all petitioners to be conscientious of how they package their paperwork.  Adding sleeves, binders, staples ALL adds time to case filing, and if everyone added these things then it would drastically slow up the number of cases processed per day.  Keep packaging as minimal as possible, follow USCIS instructions.  It's the kind thing to do in order to keep the processing time down for all.

Thank you, that's encouraging. I sent the entire package as letter sized sheets with everything just printed directly in color on those sheets. I clipped the whole thing together with a single binder clip and put it inside of a simple folder just to protect it inside of the plastic bubble wrap package.

 

I sent both of our Bio pages from our passports and our passport stamps as well as my birth certificate. I did not include any blank passport pages. The package just arrived today, hoping for a fast turnaround, but expecting delays because it's the USCIS 😅🤞

[hplusj 135]

38 minutes ago, Churros said:

Thank you, that's encouraging. I sent the entire package as letter sized sheets with everything just printed directly in color on those sheets. I clipped the whole thing together with a single binder clip and put it inside of a simple folder just to protect it inside of the plastic bubble wrap package.

 

I sent both of our Bio pages from our passports and our passport stamps as well as my birth certificate. I did not include any blank passport pages. The package just arrived today, hoping for a fast turnaround, but expecting delays because it's the USCIS 😅🤞

Wishing you the best of luck!

[TBoneTX 45,259]

On 4/14/2024 at 12:49 PM, Churros said:

She is from Peru and I'm not sure whether that's considered a high fraud country, though I'm assuming being in LATAM it is.

Every country south of the U.S. is, with the possible exception of Chile.

1 hour ago, Churros said:

I clipped the whole thing together with a single binder clip

Yes -- one big honkin' binder clip is perfect.