US Immigration from China

We are currently preparing for our AOS interview at the end of this month. I've been looking at some advice forums and I'm a little confused about what kind of evidence to bring to the interview.

Does the USCIS officer take all the evidence that is presented to them in the interview? Or do they simply review the evidence and take their own copies if necessary? I ask because I have seen that I need to bring the original letter from USCIS that we received but I don't want to surrender those documents. What about documents like Birth certificate or marriage certificate?

I just want to make sure I have all the documents I need for the interview but I don't want to lose documents I would need. Thank you for any guidance!

Hi everyone,

I'm an American citizen and my wife is a Chinese national. We met and married in China, have been married for 6 years, and have a 5 year old daughter together (born in China, but a US citizen with a CRBA). We moved back to the US 3 months ago; she has a B2 visa which she had traveled to the US with a couple times before. She's got 3 months left on her term of stay.

I've chatted with a couple lawyers about the specifics of our case, and they said that everything seemed straightforward - no criminal record, no issues with her being rejected previously, etc. However, the high cost of using a lawyer who will ultimately just sign off on our docs has pushed us towards these forums and possibly a service like SimpleCitizen.

My main concern right now is that after we married, I was on a Chinese spouse visa, which doesn't allow you to work. Because of this, I don't have 3 years of IRS tax returns; I never had a job in China that I had to pay taxes on, so there's no record I can give to the IRS. I had some income from investments and crypto that I reported for 2020, but it's a relatively small amount (a few grand). I had filed zero income since 2015, but don't have any receipts or anything to show this and the IRS website won't let me retrieve them. I paper filed my 2020 taxes after we got back to the US 3 months ago, but haven't had any correspondence from the IRS, and my attempts to figure out what's going on have gone nowhere as I can never get through to anyone, even to make an appointment at a service center. My wife doesn't have a Tax ID number so I couldn't e-file. My state return went through, though, and I have that.

I am working now and have pay stubs/records showing that I'm making over the threshold for support. Will this be enough, or should I have my parents help us with an I-864a (they are 100% willing to do and have all their paperwork on hand)? If we go with the I-864a, will I still be expected to submit my own tax returns, or would pay stubs and a W4 be enough? The lawyer we spoke to said that he thought an I-864a plus current pay stubs would be fine.

I'm hoping to get in to the local IRS service center after they open back up next week and get something from them, but in case I'm not able to, I want to know the best way to proceed.

https://www.uscis.gov/news/alerts/uscis-extends-evidence-of-status-for-conditional-permanent-residents-to-24-months-with-pending-form

So my wife was approved on Monday 8/30 for her green card in Guangzhou China. We were able to return with the passport as she needs it for travel since she is an Egyptian National. We were given a 221g stating we need to send the passport back for processing. Problem is they didn t tell us how to do that. I did research on ustraveldocs and it says to take the 221g to China CItic bank and they will get it back to Guangzhou for processing. But we signed up for the delivery company EMS to return it via priority express. Will they still ship it that way or do we have to change to pickup at local China CItic bank in Beijing? The website also says she needs her original government ID to receive it, but that s what is being shipped back. Should we fill out the form that I am picking it up and use my US passport to collect it and that she authorizes it?

We filed I-130(CR1) this month and got receipt from USCIS. And we also got a letter to suggest to create an account on the uscis website for chasing after the case or bring up questions easily. When I create an account and logged in. I found there is a file uploaded on the account which is part of the documents and proofs we submitted. However it's only very small part of the proof we sent to USCIS. Does anybody know why it was loaded on it and why is it only small part of it?