Hey guys
I m a Swiss citizen and my husband is a US citizen. We ve been married for two years and both reside in Switzerland. We recently applied for our IR1 visa.
When I was 18 years old - almost 16 years ago - I traveled to the US for 3 months to visit my prior host family (from being an exchange student when I was 15) and friends.
During that time, my friends and I were stopped by the police due to underage drinking (only in the US, in Switzerland I was legally able to drink). I only had my ID card on me, so they arrested me (only for one night, I was released on a bail bond the next morning). I had to appear in court (plead no contest) and was found guilty. I had to pay around 200.- USD fine and that was it (a first degree misdemeanor in Ohio - not sure if it was one back then)
I ve entered the US multiple times since then and never had any issues. For the immigration purpose I tried to find my court documents, but the police couldn t find anything at all using my name. Only once I finally got a case number after calling multiple places, I was able to order my certified documents from the county clerks office.
My question would be if this will be a problem during our process. Will we have to do anything special (other than getting certified copies of all case relevant documents which I already did and of course mentioning it all when getting to the NVC stage)?
An immigration lawyer we visited a while back (but didn t ever use for the IR1 process) said, that it s not a problem as it s only a misdemeanor. Just wanted to make sure
Thank you all so much for your feedback.