Immigration

We went through it! My husband is Australian. I brought him over on the K1 fiancé visa, got married, and did the adjustment of status and he now has his green card/permanent residency. Lots of paperwork but it went fairly smoothly!

We are beginning this process soon. I’m so nervous about how much work this is going to be and what happens if we file wrong... ekkk! Any general advice for us?

I just got engaged so we haven't started yet, but I am really nervous for anything to go wrong. We have been together for a few years and I can't find a reason that would make the government deny our visa, but I am nervous about not using a lawyer. I am from Texas and he is from the Netherlands. Is it possible to go through this process without a lawyer?

View Quoted Comment Yes, you can do it you yourself. A couple friends have done themselves, saved $$$ for their wedding.
All the information and the forms to fill out are available for free online from the government site.
Gather all your pictures, flight tickets, all expenses you both encountered during yoir engagement.... my friends add all this to their package. It took them about 6 months I believe.

It’s definitely possible to do it without a lawyer. Putting together the initial application package is a lot of stress and work. It took me a couple weeks and I went through every line, fixed and reprinted things about 20 times over before I sent it in lol. Definitely use the forums online (i think called visa journey?) although you will get a lot of conflicting viewpoints (Black vs blue pen, leaving things blank vs writing none or N/A, how much evidence to provide, etc) which did made things stressful. However it was nice to hear from others who successfully went through it and had similar questions. The government website isn’t much help and I even called the number one time with questions and they just referred me to the website. I just kinda went with the majority opinion from the forums of how to do it and I definitely overdid it on things like evidence of our relationship. I used tab dividers and sticky notes to make it easy for whoever was looking at it. Definitely save everything - we saved (most of) our boarding passes and included pictures, passport stamps, flight itineraries, dated letters, etc.
Our whole process from application to visa in hand was about 5 months. We didn’t get any RFEs and honestly it went really smoothly. We purposely did the application 1 year before our wedding (we put down a deposit) so that if it took shorter we could use the 6 month time period they give you and the 90 days to space it out and if it took longer he could just come right away hopefully in time for the wedding as most people said it took between 4 months to a year (usually the longer ones got RFEs which caused delays).
My husband got his work visa about 4 months after the wedding and official green card about 5-6 months after the wedding.
Good luck you guys!

View Quoted Comment Hi Danielle I am going through the process you have went through in the past and could use some help! If you could answer some of my question you would be a total life saver!