I-130 evidence of bona fide marriage what to include/not?

[I&B 1]

My husband and I are going through the process of gathering all our information for the I-130 application and I could use advice on what to include and what to leave out for the proof of bona fide marriage section.

 

Since we don't have the main examples of combined finances/property/tenancy/etc listed on the USCIS website, we've been trying to fill in with as many other things as we can. I'm worried we need more evidence rather than less since our relationship was relatively quick - we got married after just 2 years of dating, and we only knew each other for a few months before that.

 

We don't take many pictures together, so we only have 12 pictures, 2 from each of our 6 visits. Most are just of us alone together and inside, but two are with my parents and brother on two separate trips. Also, for our first visit we only had one picture of us together. Instead we added pictures we took of each other, with each of us in the same place - from when I gave him a tour of my workplace. Is this valid as proof we were together, or should we just leave it out?

 

I'm including screenshots from my employer's benefits system showing that I added my husband as a beneficiary to my life insurance and retirement plan.

 

We didn't save most of our boarding passes, so for some flights we only have the email confirmations, and since he's from Canada and I'm from the US, we don't have passport stamps. Is this good enough?

The flight emails is one of the sections I'm more unsure on. Almost every trip we've taken has had at least one change to the flight (5 changes in one case), and we've included all of the emails related to the changes. My thinking was to include all the details so the evidence matches up with exactly when he entered and left the US. Should we include everything, or am I overthinking this? I wanted to be thorough, but the pdf ended up being 57 pages long.

 

We're going to include parts of our credit card history that shows when we spent money in each other's countries when we visited, hopefully adding to proof that we were together.

 

The biggest piece of evidence we have is our call history over Discord and chat history on Tumblr. This is another spot I'm definitely worried we have too much, but I'm not sure the best way to cut it down. 

The discord call history pdf ended up being 22 pages with 3 columns of messages on each page, and that's even after cutting it down to about a third of the original to fit the 6mb size limit. Most of it is just the timestamps and lengths of all our calls for the last 2 years, but there are some text conversations in it as well. Is this too much? Should I cut it down to only the calls and leave out the text conversations? I wanted to show that we frequently talk for long periods of time when we're not together in person, but I also don't want it to be so long that it gets ignored instead.

The Tumblr chat logs are where most of our text conversation happens, I was going to pick something like 1 conversation per month for the ~2 years we've been together, but that would also end up being at least 24 pages or potentially longer. I'm wondering at this point if it's necessary since some of the threads I've seen say that chat logs aren't as useful as seeing each other in person. (It's also very difficult to go back long periods in the chat log history on that app, so if it's not necessary we could probably save a lot of time by skipping this)

 

We have receipts of buying our wedding rings online as well as gifts we've bought each other online, but from what I've seen that also doesn't seem like the best evidence - is it better to just leave these out?

 

I'd appreciate any thoughts about which of these things we should/shouldn't include, or what to trim down, or if there's better things we could include that I haven't mentioned here. Thanks!

[I&B 1]

We've mostly finished editing things down and are getting very close to submitting so I wanted to see if anyone might have any last minute advice for us?

 

As of now we are planning to submit:

1 - 12 pictures of us together over 6 different trips
2 - records of all flight purchases and changes (60pgs but broken up with a table of contents and trip summaries to hopefully make it easier to digest without reading everything)
3 - my husband found some of his old boarding passes, so we're adding the ones that we found in a separate document
4 - bank statements showing each of our purchases when visiting the other
5 - screenshots showing that I added my husband as a beneficiary to my life insurance/retirement fund
6 - call logs edited down to only the times and lengths of when we called (12pgs)
7 - chat logs, 1 conversation per month over the 2 years we've been together (56pgs - we're considering cutting this down further, but we're not sure how yet)

[Chancy 6,246]

On 1/22/2021 at 5:29 PM, I&B said:

We didn't save most of our boarding passes, so for some flights we only have the email confirmations, and since he's from Canada and I'm from the US, we don't have passport stamps. Is this good enough?

 

Have you checked your husband's I-94 travel history?  https://i94.cbp.dhs.gov/I94/#/history-search

 

The site should have a record of his US trips from the past 5 years.  In our case, we submitted a screenshot of the search results in lieu of passport stamps.  We figure the official CBP records would be credible evidence.

 

57 minutes ago, I&B said:

2 - records of all flight purchases and changes (60pgs but broken up with a table of contents and trip summaries to hopefully make it easier to digest without reading everything)

 

Why 60 pgs when you only have 6 trips?  USCIS won't care about the history of flight changes.  And you can just include the flight tickets for the trips where you can't find the boarding passes.

 

1 hour ago, I&B said:

6 - call logs edited down to only the times and lengths of when we called (12pgs)
7 - chat logs, 1 conversation per month over the 2 years we've been together (56pgs - we're considering cutting this down further, but we're not sure how yet)

 

As your husband is from Canada, which is considered a low-fraud country, I would say that these are too much.  Call logs and chat messages are not strong evidence anyway as they are not evidence of time spent together in person.

 

[angeljolie 188]

1 hour ago, I&B said:

5 - screenshots showing that I added my husband as a beneficiary to my life insurance/retirement fund

This is good evidence, if not the best. Please don't forget your marriage certificate and divorce documents, if any. Good luck! 

[I&B 1]

Thanks both of you for the input, it helps a lot to put my mind at ease that we have good evidence!

 

14 hours ago, Chancy said:

Have you checked your husband's I-94 travel history?  https://i94.cbp.dhs.gov/I94/#/history-search

 

The site should have a record of his US trips from the past 5 years.  In our case, we submitted a screenshot of the search results in lieu of passport stamps.  We figure the official CBP records would be credible evidence.

This is especially helpful, I had no idea we could do that, thanks so much! We'll definitely be including a screenshot of that as well.

 

14 hours ago, Chancy said:

Why 60 pgs when you only have 6 trips?  USCIS won't care about the history of flight changes.  And you can just include the flight tickets for the trips where you can't find the boarding passes.

Yeah, the 60 pages came from including every flight change - in that case we'll just stick with the original confirmation emails/boarding passes. Do you think that we should include the flight confirmation emails in addition if we also have the boarding pass for that flight, or is that still too redundant?

[Chancy 6,246]

6 hours ago, I&B said:

Do you think that we should include the flight confirmation emails in addition if we also have the boarding pass for that flight, or is that still too redundant?

 

Boarding passes will be enough.  If you don't have the boarding passes, put the confirmation email or ticket receipt.

 

[Bug&Bug 147]

I would say no need to put 2 photos per trip, one should be enough.  But it wont hurt either.

 

We submitted a document listing all our visits, dates, lenght of stay, and a short description.

 

Then attached a sample of:

-photos of us together,

-flight purchases where both of our names where present , and

-tickets of things we did together, 

Made sure to refer each piece of evidence to a visit in particular and covering all our dating and marriage.  Didnt bother putting more than one piece of evidence that we where together per visit.

 

Then attached the I94 ( even if they already have that info). Didnt bother putting boarding passes or itineraries that provided the same evidence as the i94.

 

And finally a page with a sample of screanshoot of phone logs going back several years.

 

(I think it was probably overkill but hey, had 0 issues.)