curiousimmigrant3

Hi everyone. We submitted our IR1 almost 3 months ago in Brazil where I reside and am a citizen. Now we’ll be moving to europe as I have a pending residency request which is moving forward. So in the next couple of months I should also hold a Portuguese residency and we’ll be living there until the US visa is approved and issued. My question is: 1) is it possible to change the US embassy interview location once the IR1 has been submitted? It seems like it is but we’d need to send a written request to rhe embassy. If you have experiences doing this I’d appreciate to hear about it. 2) If it is possible, is it easy/attainable or does it add more time to the process? Or possibly less time depending in the embassy/country backlog? Thanks in advance for the answers. We need to know this because this will affect our move and logistics in terms of extra flights and luggage we’d need to take with us.

Thanks everyone for your input. We've decided to go with the Utah online marriage given how much easier it is and for the time constraint we're in. I'll check back here with updates (positive/negative) if anything comes up

Hi, we have a similar story. Also pregnant with baby due soon now. Didnt want to give birth in my home country (Brazil-- I'm the beneficiary). Every lawyer my husband has spoken to said the chances of an "expedite" or something else due to pregnancy were slim. I also tried tourist visa (very early on in pregnancy), got denied. Thought of trying again for the tourist visa, but then with the pregnancy more advanced, I learned that the US is no longer accepting "visa babies" or whatever is called, aka people who go to the US only to have the baby and leave. We literally looked at options everywhere in the world... Canada, Europe, other places in south america, etc. Now for some unsolicited advice, coming from someone with a very similar background as you... If your wife is from Egypt, she probably knows the best places/hospitals/cities with the best hygiene rates etc. Same as me, I know which places in Brazil have the best hospitals (actually anywhere really, as long as you can pay, which is not a lot either), and thats what I did. I WISH we had spent less time trying all sort of ways to go to the US to have this baby (extremely unlikely unfortunately), and instead focused on finding the BEST city, hospital, team to deliver the baby. It would've saved us a lot of stress and headspace. Just my $0.2

did you end up applying? did it work? we also think of trying the tourist visa again (for me, 2x denied) after submitting the I-130 to hopefully be in the US for Thanksgiving, Christmas or something

Which proof did you use to show you consummated the marriage after the online ceremony? Was it a screenshot of the zoom meeting with both of you in the same screen? Because you mentioned she visited you once AFTER submitting the I-130, and from everything I've read, in order to submit the I-130 you first need to prove that the marriage has been consummated after the online ceremony.

I've seen many comments from you in said posts, but again-- only saw a handful of successful stories where they did the Utah marriage and everything went smoothly. I'm literally going through the arduous page by page research, but maybe i need to refine the search to be even more specific (?). We don't wanna possibly waste time at the end so we wanna see at least a dozen of cases where it was successful with the Utah online marriage. So far I've probably seen 3-5 On another note, would you say it makes a difference whether we're together (in the same screen) during the ceremony and we submit supporting evidence of marriage being consummated-- such as photos, bank transfers, etc (we live together anyway so there are tons of proof we can show) VS being separate during the ceremony and then submitting husband's visa stamp upon entry in Brazil as well as other supporting evidence?

The articles about the new law for marriages in Argentina are long gone, I won't find the links again (they were in portuguese and spanish also, so not relevant), but here's the latest I was looking into: https://fab-weddings.com/en-faqs.html Seems like a few years back Argentina has "updated" their marriage system, making it an attractive option for a destination marriage as well as for same sex couples

I'm actively looking into this now, especially cases where it was actually accepted. So far I've seen about 3-4 cases only out of the many pages here in VJ, but I'll keep looking.

Wow that's amazing, congrats! You're in the UK right? Did you do anything "special" or out of the norm for your process to be approved so fast? Or was it just out of luck? What kind of proof did yu submit with your paperwork to show that you had "consummated" the marriage after the ceremony-- passport stamps or something of the sort?

I also read the same information re: Utah online marriage, but after speaking with several immigration lawyers, all of them recommended against it as they said it would either result in the paperwork being denied, or they'd request supporting documents which would end up delaying the process even more

I'm the beneficiary spouse of a US citizen and we are based in Brazil. We haven't officially got married yet because the marriage procedure here in Brazil is long (takes 30-45 days to get the license) and requires a birth certificate from the US citizen issued within the last 90 days, which we also don't have and is a hassle to get. We're in a hurry because our baby is due in about 1,5 months. That's why we're now considering getting married in our neighbour country, Argentina, which apparently can be done within 7 days more or less. The idea would be to get married there and then transcribe the marriage certificate in the US consulate (since it needs to be "translated" officially to english) then apply for the IR1-CR1 visa. HOWEVER, as I, the spouse, am based in Brazil and I have no residency or ties whatsoever to Argentina, we're uncertain whether the Argentinian marriage certificate would be accepted in our green card application OR if it would just be flat out refused and ending up wasting us time at the end of the day. I have Brazilian residency so all the process will be done through Brazil. When researching online, I've found no peculiarities as to "the marriage certificate must be issued in the spouse's country of residency", but because the US government already doesn't recognize the online Utah marriage, we're hesitant to get married abroad. Has anyone had a similar experience? p.s: We have requested a new birth certificate for my fiance 2 months ago to be shipped from the US to Brazil, but it got stuck in customs and after 2 months waiting for this document specifically on top of 4 months wasted, we're looking for other options to get married asap after wasting 6 months. We also looked into online marriage from Utah but all the lawyers we talked to recommended against it. We might or might not be able to transcribe the argentinian marriage to Brazil depending if they request the updated birth certificate or not, which is a hassle to get.