Sam_Son_83

18 minutes ago, Denisson26 said:

I have silently perseverated with my pain and until the current date I have been attending therapy sessions due to the depression that I went into after the abuses perpetrated by my spouse. 

Before I knew about VAWA, I turned to the local domestic abuse center seeking for help after have fled from my spouse and had lost the capabilities to react due to the distress and painful memories caused by what I went through and fearing harm for having left him. 

As per the current time, the hurtful feelings as subject of the abuse follow me like my shadow and they are vivid as light. I have been battered physical and mentally. My spouse forced me to have sexual intercourse with hime more than once and even my son witnessed one of those occurrences. 

Given the circumstances, it is shameful that someone who has being here trying to help victims of domestic abuse misjudge my situation without knowing my story and without knowing who is behind the screen. 

Because my case do noes fit with your preconceived thoughts and you do not empathise with my situation, it does not make it false. 

Shame on you! 

Agreed. That was incredibly out of line.

1 hour ago, ColoradoGirl1985 said:

does uscis put me in court right after they deny i751? i mean if my i751 is denied on jan 1st 2020, is it possible that they don't put me in court in next couple months?

 

i'm only asking because how much i have to refile i751. i have to get all the paper etc, i don't want to rush and make a mistake.

 

thanks again

From denial to court would almost certainly take longer than a couple of months.

I wasn't denied, but was in a pretty bad situation anticipating denial. According to one of the best immigration attorneys in the state it would have taken several months, but more likely between 1-2 years for me to appear in court.

On 9/5/2017 at 7:17 AM, sandranj said:

Considering  what you  mentioned you  have "an unpleasant " marriage,not  abuse.  Maybe you  have more to your  story but  usually when someone is mentally abused we can feel this just reading a brief explanation  and I did no get this reading your  post. 

 

If you  are being mentally abused then you  need to attend 5/7 therapy sessions and you can file Vawa but  you  will need a diagnose of major depression and/or PTSD, without a diagnose you  don't have a VAWA case.

 

 

Wow.

She mentioned, among others, a situation that could meet the definition of assault with a deadly weapon.

I know this sounds like a platitude (it did to me as well, until my case was approved today)... but it's true. Do everything necessary, get your ducks in a row but other than that try to get your head off of it. There will be long wait times, and plenty of time to drive yourself nuts. 

But there's nothing you can really do (except having your ducks in a row)... so might as well not worry about it until you have to.

Think of it this way: USCIS is VERY good at finding out the truth. If it's in your favor, no need to stress. They will know. You've done nothing wrong, you're an honest man - feel like it.

Live your life, don't hesitate to advance your career etc. - don't let this stand in your way. You might regret not having done things once you have your approval in hand.

Feel free to shoot me a message should you ever feel like it!

Hi,

No, I wouls not worry about removal proceedings. You filed a divorce waiver, the only thing that should happen in the future is that you receive an RFE asking for the divorce paperwork (from what I understand the divorce certificate wasn't submitted with your I751).

Also, you wouldn't just be put into removal proceedings because your wife sends the USCIS nasty letters. Just as a side note, you wouldn't be the first case that I read about where exactly this happens and people get approved. I doubt it is out of the ordinary for false allegations to be sent to USCIS by vengeful ex-wives - which they are aware of.

As to leaving the country... while lawyers will likely advise you to keep it at a minimum and to tread careful, you shouldn't encounter any major issues (except maybe a secondary inspection). I have traveled out of country while after my divorce, with my valid greencard and later on with extension stamps in my passport. Again, never any real issues, only two secondary inspections - which aren't a big deal.

Lawyer? Well at this point you already filed - so they wouldn't be able to actually do much. There might be the possibility of switching to a VAWA case - this idea was floated to me by a very high profile immigration lawyer. This might have several benefits in case the initial application would pop. But you'd most likely have an RFE, Interview etc first anyways. But if you have the money to spend it might be good to talk to a lawyer, even if only to put your mind at rest and have someone that is familiar with your case to contact should things go sideways.

Overall you have, in my estimation, a very strong case. I was in an abusive relationship as well and didn't have much to show for, as my marriage was VERY short (well under a year). And it went well, even though the interview was a horrible experience. If you are honest and upfront you have little to worry about!

To everyone else in similar situations: Do not despair. I know, it's hard to believe, I've been there and know the constant stress and negative feelings.

Hang in there. If you know in your heart that you have nothing to hide all will be well in the long run. Just be truthful and open.

I'm the living proof. Very short marriage, definitely less to show for than others in terms of materials I submitted (due to a very dysfunctional marriage) - but I stayed truthful and honest and it all worked out.

Wishing you all the best of luck with your journey!

15 minutes ago, TBoneTX said:

Thanks for the happy update.  You must feel great!

To be honest it hasn't quite registered yet!

I woke up when my gf left for work at 5am and saw the text message, prompting me to check the status online. Talk about a couple of stressful minutes until I was logged in. 

It is such a relief!

Just to give a quick update:

After almost 1000 days and a horrible interview experience... I just recieved the notification that my case was approved and my card is in production.

Thank you very much for your detailed answer. I guess I will have to see what the attorney has to say on Monday! Not much I can do at the moment anyways.

1 minute ago, geowrian said:

I don't want to be hard on the OP (sorry!),  but some of those questions asked make sense and aren't unreasonable. They want to know specifics. If something sounds off, they will hone in on that to see what's up. For instance, the reprimand + silent treatment question is reasonable...which one was it, or was it actually both at different times? They want to see how one responds to the probing...fraudsters can be pretty well educated on how to make claims of abuse, but that tends to fall apart under questioning.

But also don't think just hard questioning means the Io didn't believe you. Hard questioning is a tactic to detect fraud, not a sign that they believe fraud actually occurred before asking it.

Thank you for your comment. What you say about other options makes perfect sense.

I'm aware that the hard questioning can and is a tactic to detect fraud. It's just something else when you experience it yourself, it is very unsettling.

While I know in my heart that I was in love with this woman and wanted nothing more than spending the rest of my life with her, it make you question yourself in regards to "did I put my foot in my mouth" due to being under so much stress. 

I'm someone that (sometimes too much) approaches things with reason and logic. But there wasn't any reason and logic in the nature of this relationship. It somehow felt that as I was trying to reason, he got more and more stand-offish. At the end, as I became emotional and just told him that this relationship was a huge mess etc... I might be imagining too much, but that seemed to satisfy him more than "reason".

But then again, that could have just been him mentally being done with the interview. I guess I will see.

14 minutes ago, Ontarkie said:

  Since you applied with the divorce waiver only that is what you should focus on. Many times it goes for supervisor review before approvals. He may not have liked your evidence of abuse when you didn't submit  the abuse waiver, but he should have focused on what proof you had for your marriage. Before freaking out any more I would wait. You already had the help of a lawyer, and it sounds like he knew what he was doing.

 

What type of proof did you submit? 

As the marriage wasn't very long, my lawyer did a pretty good job at still putting together a pretty big package. It was almost 400 pages (including the original AOS filing):

- Statement by the attorney summarizing the evidence and outlining why I qualify

- Long personal statement outlining the entire relationship from beginning to the end

- Multiple items proving same address (Driver's Licenses, rental agreement etc)

- Monthly samples of the various messages between us (including screenshot of the total number of FB messages alone, in excess of 120k)

- Letters, cards, packages we sent each other

- Bank statements

- Proof of ehr visiting me in Europe twice during the K1 wait\

- Sworn statements by three parties having witnessed the relationship

- Letter from a hospital outlining my mental state due to relationship issues

- Letter from a psychologist that I saw several times outlining the issues I had due to the relationship

There's probably some stuff that I'm not remembering off the top of my head.

During the interview, the officer didn't really go into the relationship itself. Except for one or two times in which he made it clear in a very demeaning way that I was exaggerating the abuse. He was mostly focused on the financials, was wondering why my dad was supporting us financially in the beginning, yet I was able to transfer several thousand dollars from my European bank account into our shared US account during a visit in Europe towards the end of the relationship (I was abroad for a couple of month due to my father being ill).

He constantly said that he wouldn't be able to approve with what I have, asked me what I would think if presented with such flimsy evidence and implied fraud. It was very, very negative.

He mentioned that by the dates alone (filing of the ROC and the divorce) I wouldn't even have qualified for the conditional card to begin with. The package had already been prepared but seemingly sent a couple of days after the finalizing of the divorce - I am honestly not clear about the details here. Odd to me that I even received an interview - and that the below "potential approval" was even entertained by him. I don't know if this is rather positive or negative - the fact that it wasn't denied straight away by him. 

At the end he asked me if I had anything to ad. At which point I became a bit emotional and told him that I am well aware that this is not a lot, but that this is due to the relationship having been such a mess. I told him that I had a stable life in Europe before all this chaos was introduced into my life. He then asked me "why don't/didn't you go back?" I told him that I thought about it multiple times (he seemed a bit surprised by this answer), but that during my recovery from this mess, I had met a new, wonderful person - her being the reason for having moved to where I reside now. He seemed very interested in this and asked for her name and wrote it down.

It seemed at the end that it was just a tad bit more positive. He closed my folder and told me that he is either going to approve or deny (this question didn't even seem to be an option earlier) it later in the day after looking at it again and that I would either get an approval letter or a NTA. 

The marriage was around 5 months. I have put a lot of information about the interview itself in the initial post.

3 minutes ago, Khallaf said:

Did you file with a divorce waiver?

It says I filed with the "simple" [divorce only] waiver in the quoted paragraph.

3 minutes ago, Ontarkie said:

What waivers did you apply for? Divorce waiver or divorce and abuse waiver? 

 

While the relationship was very abusive (I ended up being admitted to a psychiatric warden due to a nervous breakdown when visiting my family), I applied for the "simple" waiver. My attorney said that the abuse would be rather difficult to prove, as it is often the case with emotional abuse.

It seems he was right, as the officer was giving me a hard time for some of the examples of behavior I made in my personal statement. It seemed he didn't see "silent treatment" as a valid abuse mechanism, and also seemed to doubt that my wife belitteling and scolding me like a child would be abusive.

Hi All,

I'm going to meet with a lawyer on Monday, but as you all know this is all very stressful and I am trying to wrap my head around possible options.

I had my Waiver ROC interview several days ago, and it left me with a bad feeling. The officer didn't tell me that he was going to deny it directly, but I have a bad gut feeling about it. I know in my heart that my marriage was bona fide, but I also know that it doesn't look very good - especially on paper (short marriage etc.)

Anyways, as the wait for the ROC was so long, I have by rebuild my life and met a wonderful person. We are planning on marrying and building a family - but my plan was to complete the ROC first completely on my own, as to start from a clean slate. The last years with this person have been pretty much everything I had hoped my initial relationship would have led to, I am deeply involved in the family and we have built a fantastic relationship, traveling the world together etc. This person has, due to the currently long wait times, also waited a considerable time. And now this.

So, in case of a denial what are my options?

Of course, I could wait for the NTA. But I heard that this could technically take a LONG time, years in some cases. So I was considering other options.

• Could we I130-i485 during the removal proceedings? I guess this could lead to me presenting the hopefully approved applications to the judge, we defineitly have more than enough proof of a bona fide relationship.
• Could I leave the country and we go the K1 route? This wouldn't be very easy, because we are currently sharing a house and expenses - basically live as if we were married.

Any other options anyone could think of and that I could discuss with the attorney?

Of course there is still hope the ROC still gets approved. I'm a fairly negative person when it comes to these things, and I think I have every right to think so. 

Also, there were a couple of details during the interview that give me a tiny glimmer of hope, I won't put them in here, but if anyone has experience with tough ROC interviews, I'd appreciate someone reaching out via PM very much to discuss.

Thank you!

Interesting edit there, missileman.

I agree, it could go either way, certain things seem to sometimes happens at USCIS that are out of the ordinary, but then seemingly don't have any impact.

And I'm overthinking probably.

As you can probably imagine, it's a tough feeling. I know in my heart that I loved this girl like crazy and would have gone to extremes to make her happy - in the end, this was precisely my issue... the thought of if I just bed over further and accept even more insanity she regularly introduces... at some point she surely will see that our live is great. Big Mistake.

It's really tough to know all that, and then realize that some people can't seem to wrap their heads around it. 

The only slither of hope I have is that the last statement, in which I outlined the above a bit in a more seemed to slightly change something. Maybe I was able to convey what happened at least a little bit. He was also weirdly interested in my current gf and her (rather unusual) occupation and took notes about her - something which shouldn't matter at all. I was also weirded out by him asking about my military service, which is so long ago that I rarely even think of it.

I just can't make sense of a couple of things. And considering that pretty much everything is on the line for me and my gf (we want to get married once I figure this mess out). And now it's this waiting game - with the potential of hiring another $700/h attorney. 

Just to add: He didn't take either my expired card nor the passport pictures I brought. Does this mean anything?

Just now, missileman said:

I'm sorry to read this.  I think the your best course of action is to immediately start preparing for the appearance before an immigration judge with an attorney.....I hope I'm wrong...good luck.

I have already contacted who is supposedly one of the best attorneys in the area and will be meeting with him on Monday.

Hey there,

So after having filed my I751 waiver with the help of a rather expensive lawyer, I received an interview notice. Overall, the marriage was very short, due to my wife being mentally unstable and abusive. I'm not going into details, unless there's specific interest for it - but let's just say she threw me in a world of turmoil and pain. So I didn't' have the average laundry list of evidence, but with the advise of my lawyer I wrote a lengthy statement outlining the entirety of the relationship. A bit more to that later.

No to the interview. I got there without my lawyer (I had in the meantime to another city and having him travel would have caused astronomical costs), but was fairly confident.

This changed very quickly. The officer conducted the interview in a manner that couldn't have been further from what I expected, there was pretty much no opportunity for me to establish the narrative of how the relationship developed. The few times I brought it up, one specific example of emotional abuse I brought up in my statement, it was pretty much doubted and almost ridiculed ("so you are saying she reprimanded you like a little child and gave you silent treatment. How does that work? Did she reprimand you or was she silent? That doesn't make any sense to me."

It was these situations that completely shocked me and turned me into pretty much a bumbling mess. There was no possibility to give an insight into the nature of the relationship, it was mostly just money etc he was interested in... which don't give a good understanding of the situation - especially in cases such as mine.

My father had sent us money to support us in the beginning (I didn't have an EAD yet, so many often was tight). When I went back to Europe for a while to visit my family, my father was severely ill, he had two questions about the timeframe. First he seemed to doubt that I would go visit my gravely ill father, while I had someone that I called "the woman of my dreams" on a different continent. 

WHile I was visiting my family, my wife became increasingly cruel over the phone. I wasn't earning for days etc and one night had a nervous breakdown. I attached a letter from the hospital stating that my state was due to a very stressful and potentially abusive relationship I was in. His comment was that this breakdown could have well been due to my father's illness and not my wife. I was just speechless. I'm unsure if he didn't read the letter or if he did this on purpose.

Another point he brought up was that I had sent several thousand dollars to my wife via our shared bank account (that I could barely remember). He was asking me how it was possible for me to have savings like that, yet my father was still sending us smaller, regular amounts previously. He said that didn't make any sense to him. At some point he went to the very back of the application and asked if I was in the military, which I confirmed. No follow up questions to that.

The interview went really bad. He was pretty much telling all the time that all this wasn't convincing, "what would you say if you looked at this" etc. I was just terrified.

At the very end he asked me if there was anything I'd like to add, to which I resaponded If it could be something on a more personal note. He said yes.

At this point I got a bit emotional, pretty much told him that yes, I made a lot of mistakes. And that I know that all my submissions look like a mess, because they are the result of a very messy relationship. And that I had a stable life in Germany. To this he asked "so why don't or didn't you go back". I answered that I honestly thought about this quite a few times, but that I have found a person i deeply love and want to fix this mess on my own so we could have a good start. I told him that I had moved down here for her, after she had moved for her job. Mentioning this seemed to really interest him, as he took a note of her name and her job.

What was weird was that in the very end he seemed to have softened just a tad bit, almost unnoticeably. And he then said: "Listen, I will review your file later today and will then either approve it or not, in which case you will have the opportunity to go in front of a judge." I didn't expect this, as he was VERY negative and stand-offish.

How long should it take for me to know the result (online and mail), assuming he made a decision yesterday?

What do you guys think overall? Am I catastrophizing, is there still a chance that it might get approved?

Thank you, any discussion would be appreciated, as I am very stressed about it.

How much in terms of communication between the two of you do you have during the timeframe she was in Brazil?

This is just my opinion, but I wouldn't give up hope with removing the ROC on your own in this situation.

Your situation might have resulted in not having the "regular" proof of a bona fide marriage, but if you think a bit out of the box you might be able to come up with materials that show your intent when you got married. If your intentions weren't to circumvent immmigration, you might very well be able to illustrate it.

I myself had not too much of the proof people provid for their ROC, as my dysfunctional marriage was rather short. But I did not receive any RFE and will soon go in for my interview.

Things to consider:

1. Longer cover letter, outlining your relationship in detail from beginning to the end (mine was over 10 pages long).

2. Affidavits from people that have witnessed the relationship (I had three from people close to both me and my ex).

3. You could maybe find documents showing transactions supporting your statement of having supported her.

4. Letters, cards, emails, messages, call logs (I provided these for the duration of the entire relationship).

Overall, I would start with the ROC waiver. Even in case this doesn't work out, there will still be other avenues.

20 hours ago, mindthegap said:

No (and I speak as one of the few people on here who has received a denial)

 

 

Thank you for the reply. I will dig through your post history for more information.

This is the last piece that still keeps me connected to this very bad place I found myself in with this person and I cannot wait for this to be severed. It wouldn't be quite as stressful if I hadn't rebuilt such a great life for myself and met a wonderful person - which also now feels like it hinges on the approval. Ugh.

Hi All,

I submitted my application in August of 2016, divorce waiver case. It was a short marriage, my ex-wife was suffering from rather severe mental health issues. As I was a little light on the evidence side (financial commingling), I seemed out the help of an attorney. I think we did a pretty good job at "painting the picture", including a 10+ pages cover letter outlining the relationship from the beginning to the end. I expected to receive an RFE, but now, after more than two years I received an interview notice.

I am aware that anyone's guess is as good as mine, but one can imagine that I'm quite nervous about it. After this desasterous marriage I was able to rebuild my life, and just the thought of having to leave it behind is inconceivable - and I am back to ruminating about everything.

Could it be interpreted somehow to have not received an RFE but an interview?

As I have recently moved (case has been transferred, so it's all good on that front), I'm a bit unsure about taking my lawyer with me to the interview. This would probably mean high expenses for his travel etc. The lawyer wasn't exactly cheap to begin with. So this is something else that is bothering me... Do I need the lawyer? How helpful is it in the big picture?

In case the application does get denied, do I lose status on the spot? This would cause a lot of issues, as my current partner which whom I live together can't cohabitate with a person that is out of status, for reasons I'm not going to get into.

Any kind of input would be appreciated, as I have again this feeling of being more or less alone with this situation.

Thank you!

I just received my interview notice in the mail. It will take place on December 3rd - I'm really nervous about it.

19 minutes ago, Californian wife said:

I think I'm the last VJ member that still checks this thread as  my I751 is still pending ....  I still haven't heard anything regarding my N400 reschedule. Pray for me  LOL

You might very well be, lol.

i feel like I'm the last here. Not a good feeling, since I'm worrying a lot about my interview.