Secret Green Card Loopholes

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Hi this is Kaushik Ranchod here with Brian at The Ranchod Law Group for our weekly immigration show. Today we have some exciting topics that we’re going to talk about – we’re going to talk about green card loopholes that you may not have heard of, we’re going to talk about waivers, the I-751 were you may be divorced but still be able to renew your green card and much more. We’re also going to talk about family based petitions. In our last show we talked about the military and how, if your child spouse or parent were in the military, they could help you to get work authorization and eventually a green card – that was really popular: about 25,000 people tuned in either watching this video or after.The fact and I wanted to revisit is that if you have such a family member that I mentioned, they can file parole in place for you that would allow you to eventually get a green card Then the other thing that we got a lot of questions about is family based petitions. So for instance:

If your child is over 21 can they petition for you?

In this case your child can petition an form I-130 for you – but that’s only part of the story. A lot of times we would advise you not to file the form I-130 if you can move to the next step of the green card process. So if you have a child that is over 21 and you want to get a green card if you’ve entered illegally you can do what’s called adjustment of status which is the technical term for applying for a green card within the U.S..

What happens if you’ve entered the U.S. without a visa?

This is known as entry without inspection. In that situation, you might be eligible for something called 245i or you may be eligible for a waiver. However the Waivers wouldn’t be through your child, they would file the form I-130 and then the I-601A waiver would be through a different family relation, through a spouse or a parent and if you entered on TPS you may also be eligible to apply for a green card within the U.S. without having to get a waiver.

We’ve also been getting questions about the I-751. The I-751 is where you have to renew your green card after 2 years and I recommend you do it 90 days before the 2 year period after getting your original green card If you haven’t been married and if you don’t do that, you will be put into Deportation proceedings so it’s really important that you do this! We’re talking about the importance of renewing your I-751, just wanted to correct myself, you won’t necessarily be put in Removal Proceedings but we have seen cases where that does happen and even if you get divorced within that 2 year period you can file what’s called the removal of the joint conditions through a waiver, and there are 2 ways you can remove the conditions:

  1. By showing that you have a good faith marriage.
  2. By showing hardship.

You can also make an argument based off of both of those grounds. We do many of these waivers. Typically, you will get called in for an interview in that situation. For a good faith marriage. It’s really important to show that you really entered the marriage with the intent to permanently live together and the way that you do that is by providing a variety of documents – affidavits from friends and family. Those are some of the ways that you do it and it’s very important that you build a very detailed and extensive situation because you have the burden of proof of demonstrating that you had a real marriage. Alright I want to thank you for tuning in, that is going to be it for today, I want to wish you a very happy new year! Ask your questions below and we can talk about them next time or we can discuss them in the chat below. I want to thank you for the awesome year, you guys have been amazing and don’t give up there’s a lot of pathways for you to get legal and maybe for some of you there aren’t, so we’ll be able to advise you, at least you’ll know what to do – thank you and have an awesome day.