PeterMcS

About the amount of assets needed if there's insufficient income, for purposes of citing the law/regulations in my cover letter to a I-290B: we're married, so the relevant standard is 3x the income deficiency? She came in on a K-1, so before we were married it would have been 5x? We have far more than either: I just want to make sure I cite the right regulation.

I believe the "reopen" option is for submitting additional evidence, and the "reconsider" option is for error. We're thinking of checking both options. Thanks! We'll take a look.

My wife's I-485 application was denied because of my I-864, Affidavit of Support. We filed it over a year ago and they sent us an RFE (covered in this previous post by me) saying "we could not determine that the petitioning sponsor on Form I-864, Affidavit of Support, is qualified." They requested we get a joint sponsor or submit evidence of assets. I thought maybe it was an autogenerated letter, based on my low reported income, as I'd already presented evidence of assets on my I-864. We saw online that their scans of our evidence were incomplete, uploaded the missing parts, and replied that we'd already presented evidence of assets and added the pieces they were missing. The other day, we got notice that her I-485 was denied because the RFE had requested a joint sponsor or evidence of assets and we hadn't presented it. I had been worried that my non-standard assets (about ~$1 million in crypto) would be an issue, either because they wouldn't understand it or because the previous administration was very anti-crypto (e.g. debanking crypto customers because of regulatory pressure). Of course it could just be common incompetence. My wife will lose her employment authorization within a couple of weeks "unless you submit, within 18 days, proof that your Form I-485 remains pending." She cried over that, and we've been stressed about this. They say there's an I-290B form that we can submit to reopen (with additional evidence) and/or reconsider (if they made an error) the case. I don't know if submitting that's enough to keep her work permit, but I hope so. The additional evidence could be the $300K more in assets we have (in a regular investment account, not crypto). The error would be they missed the evidence of assets originally submitted. I just wrote our congressman earlier tonight, and we plan to submit the I-290B later this week. Does anyone have experience or suggestions on how to deal with this?

Two notes that you may be interested in: Apparently, lots of people don't pass the medical right away: their lung x-rays aren't clear so they have to do a sputum test, to check for bacterial infection I believe. Consequently, they have to cancel their visa interview, and I believe the delay is months. My fiancee talked online with five people who did the medical the same day as she did (she'd met some online beforehand, and others she just met that day). She was the only one of them that passed the medical. She adopted healthy habits approaching her medical (eating, sleeping, exercising), and also chose to take an antibiotic for a week before the medical. She had another online friend that also passed the medical at a different time, and that one had also independently decided to take an antibiotic before her interview. All the usual disclaimers apply: this isn't medical advice, doctors should prescribe medications (though you can generally get them without a prescription in the Philippines), etc. They didn't even ask my fiancee for her I-134. They did ask her what I did for a living. So no one ever even looked at all the documentation that I spent a lot of time preparing. Of course, they may ask for yours, so provide everything they ask for.