Help, advice needed

[celtic.irie 0]

Hi All!

 

First of I want to thank everyone for making this page so amazing with being such an active community. It has been my resource through most of my trying to understand this process of getting my fiance over to the USA. So here is my situation, my fiance is native to Jamaica, but when he was in his early twenties, he was not leading the best of lives, and he got caught and convicted with a felony gun possession and intent to discharge the firearm in Canada where he was living with his mother. His family did not have the money to get him an attorney and so he only had a public defender, and although they were trying to pin more charges on him because of the company he was keeping, he was only charged with the gun felonies but they automatically have a mandatory minimum prison sentence allotted to such crimes . He did receive 5 years in prison, and after his stay, he was deported back to Jamaica. This was over 15 years ago. He has changed around his life, and has had no brushes with the law since then, but I know that this criminal history can be a huge red flag for immigration. My question to everyone here, is I have contacted attorneys, and the prices that they are throwing at me are pretty steep, not that I am against paying it, but they are saying that they won't even know if he will need any waiver until the interview process but yet they want over $3500 just for their legal fee to try to represent us for the K-1 process and then if needed, that big lump of money will cover the waiver process to show undue hardship. I was trying to decide though what would be the damage or harm to our case, if we were to complete the K-1 process on our own, following the guides here, and then only if we are denied, which I know the odds are pretty high that we will be, then I can fork over the $$$$ to the attorneys to take on the visa waiver case. Furthermore, if we are denied, I plan on getting married to him and then applying for the spousal immigration visa with the waiver, since I know that the process with the visa waiver can take over a year, and I really do not want to wait that long to get to say I do. .....  am I just being silly in even thinking to try to do the K-1 visa process with his criminal history being what it is? Do I just need to pay the money and realize that if I want to get married this year, I will need to just focus on doing the Cr-1 visa and visa waiver??

 

Any and all help or advice from you folks will be most appreciated! Thanks!

[TNJ17 1,329]

With his criminal background unfortunately there is no way you can get an approval on your own or at all. You would be saving a lot of money and time and headache if you just go the CR1 route with a lawyer from the beginning. You should shop around some more but that rate does seem right for someone with that kind of a criminal record. It’s gonna take A LOT of work to get this approved I’m sure you know that but be prepared for the long long and very stressful road. There are some people in this forum who have been successful with getting approved with a criminal background but I don’t think theirs were are serious as yours but it might be worth it doing a search here and see how they handled it. Good luck. 

Edited March 8, 2018 by TNJ17