calliopejen

Thanks all for your help! I may schedule travel in the United States to avoid the risk of having to cancel last-minute. On the other hand, we may tie the knot in advance of our big wedding ceremony, because my fiance is now concerned about his ability to travel to Spain to record/conduct music there later (a good chunk of his business is in Spain). So look forward to more postings from me as I navigate this process!

Alternately, do you know if traveling to US territories like Guam, American Samoa, or Puerto Rico presents a problem for re-entry with an expired F-1? (I would think not...)

I am a US citizen and my fiance is from Spain, and we are trying to figure out whether it will be possible to do a honeymoon outside of the US given his immigration situation. He's currently on an OPT that is valid through October, but his F-1 visa itself expires in ten days, so he will be unable to leave the US during that period. (He just realized this issue about the inability to reenter...) Our wedding is scheduled for August 17, and we been hoping to travel both before and after the wedding because I will be between jobs at that point. I see at http://www.visajourney.com/content/times that the current wait time for the California service center for an I-131 is three months. Does that number tend to be about right/an overstatement/an understatement?

Right now we are debating just doing a courthouse marriage ASAP (in addition to our big August wedding) so that we can get all of the paperwork out the door and try for advance parole as soon as possible. Would this be worth the hassle? Maybe traveling internationally before the wedding is a lost cause, but do you have any sense of the odds of having advance parole before, say, August 22?

Thanks for all your help!