Today, I’m here to talk to you about the seven mistakes you want to avoid when you are filling out the K1, K2, or K3 visa petition with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service.
I am a Passport Brother who brought his fiancée to the US from Vietnam to live with me in the United States.
We got married a few months ago, and now we are preparing for the next phase of our lives over the next few years here in the States.
And then ultimately, we will move back to Southeast Asia, where we will live happily in early retirement.
I am also an advocate for men of all ages, all over the world, who desire a traditional life in a conventional marriage in this troublesome era of misandry-based feminism and pseudo-progressive modern women.
Today, I’m here to discuss the Seven Mistakes You Must Avoid When Completing a K1, K2, or K3 Visa Petition from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service.
I’m writing as someone who’s gone through the K1 Visa process, also known as the fiancée Visa process, twice.
As someone who’s gone through the process twice, I have a good grasp of what mistakes to avoid when you’re filling out your petition for a K1, K2, or K3 visa process with USCIS.
#1 The First Mistake You Want To Avoid Is: Filing Too Early.
And by that I mean once you’ve met your fiancée and you realize that there is chemistry between you, and you two will move on to the next step, whatever that may be, whether it’s engagement or marriage, you want to stop, take a deep breath, and wait.
You want to pause and figure out the best way to get from point A to point B.
Too often, people rush through the process. They fall in love, get butterflies, sit down, and start filling out the long, complex, and challenging I-129F petition. Immediately, they will become lost.
You don’t want to do that because there are steps you need to take first to ensure your petition has the best chance of being approved and sent to the National Visa Center.
And you can’t do that if you rush. So you want to wait first, then plan, and then strategize. You want to prepare as many visits as possible to your fiancé’s home country before you submit your petition.
Now is the best time to arrange schedules and lifestyles to get the most visits. With those visits, you want to start hoarding and saving receipts from all your travel accommodations, flights, hotels, air travel fees, meals, coffee dates, and going out to the club.
Whatever. If you want to take your time to plan and strategize all of it because you will need to account for the money and the time later.
Start by opening a Word doc or a Google document and logging all your communications, including dates and approximate times if you want.
The point is, that you want to have this information prepped and ready because at some point you will need to refer to it, and then later on you will need to provide it in written form.
So that’s why you don’t want to file it too early. We don’t have enough of this information to attach to your petition.
#2 Avoid Filing Before You Document Anything
Let’s clarify: you’ve gone through the process. You’ve met your fiancée and decided you want to move forward with the relationship.
Then, when you file, you realize that you have no supporting documents whatsoever.
This ties into the first item, and it means you cannot prove that you have a real and true relationship. There is no paper trail.
In this case, the source material that you need to provide is government documents like birth certificates, marriage licenses, marriage contracts, divorce decrees, rental agreements, mortgage agreements, deeds, work history, etc.
Go to these various agencies, get the documents, and have copies made. You’re going to attach all of this to your petition, so you do not want to file before you start listing the government agencies you need to contact.
Reach out to those agencies to get the materials, and then acquire the birth certificates, the marriage licenses, and the divorce decrees.
All of these documents will take you some time to get. You don’t want to file until you have those in your hands.
#3 Get Distracted By Unsolicited Advice
You don’t want to get caught up in the unsolicited advice that you are guaranteed to receive from people who’ve never gone through the immigration or visa process. But they have a ton of horror stories from family, friends, and others about going through the K1, K2, or K3 visa process.
Don’t bother, listen to them. Don’t entertain them.
Every case is different, and far too often, someone out there has gone through a situation more challenging than others. What they won’t share with you are details, errors, or the mistakes that they made that caused that situation to be different.
They’re just going to cry and moan and groan that their case took too long or they had too many problems or something like that.
So don’t entertain unsolicited advice from anyone who has not gone through the K-1, K2, or K3 Visa process. Nine times out of ten, they won’t know what they’re talking about.
So you need to reject them and reject their advice
#4 Believe The Process Will Be Short
Never believe the process will be shorter than expected. Many people who have gone through immigration may tell you that their situation was easy and fast. But what is, “easy and fast”? And what is their real start date?
Now, this is a mistake my fiancé and I made: when we started our process early in 2018, we were excited and ready to go.
And I made a habit of checking the USCIS website for the list of processing times. The processing times page gives us a decent range of how long it will take. At the time, it was between 5 to 9 months. But we had many people around us who kept saying, “No!” because they’d gone through the process long before Donald Trump was President of the United States
They kept telling us, It takes only two months. It takes only three months. And it took 12 months for us to get our interview scheduled. So we caused ourselves a lot of anxiety by worrying about why we hadn’t received a notice when the USCIS website told us how long the process was going to take.
And remember, every case is different. Every case is different. No case is the same. My case with my fiancé Nghia was nothing like anybody else’s case that we know of. Yet everyone wanted us to follow their advice.
Along with that, people exaggerate. They want you to think that their situation was somehow special or that they received favoritism or something like that.
And it’s not the truth. It’s not real. You just have to be patient, and you have to trust the posted USCIS Processing Times website. That is your best indication of how long this is going to take.
Here’s the link: https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times/
#5 Not Taking The Opportunity To OverDeliver
When you have the chance, do more! And by that, I mean there are certain requirements that you need to provide to the USCIS for your petition.
If it asks for, say, five letters of recommendation, give them ten. If they ask for two employment letters, you provide them with employment letters from your last five employers.
If it asks for bank statements, instead of giving them 1 or 2 months, give them 6 months. You always want to overdeliver with the information that they request.
Why overdeliver? You do not want the USCIS to come back to you asking for more because you’re going to add 1-3 months of processing time to your petition.
For example, it will take another month for you to gather that information, submit it to them, then another month for them to intake it, and then another month for them to process and review it.
So you don’t want to waste time. You want to give USCIS everything they ask for, times 2X, 3X, or 10X if you can.
Mistake number six is something that happened to me early on. But then I caught wind of it and I started to prepare myself against it.
#6 Ensure You Maintain Digital Copies of all of your documents
Always keep scanned digital copies of everything you produce, create, and correspondence you receive, whether the mail is going in or out.
You want to keep the digital copy on your computer in one location and ensure it’s high resolution (200-300 dpi) in PDF format.
Don’t bother with image formats because they can get too large and aren’t text-searchable like PDFs.
Here’s the thing about keeping scanned copies. Once you produce it, you’ll never have to make it again.
When you’re going through this process, you will find out that many of the forms, documents, and exhibits that you have assembled in the early stages of your K1, K2, and K3 visa process, you will need to reproduce or reuse that those documents again in later forms like the I-485, I-765 or the I-130 or any other forms like that.
So once you make it, you never have to make it again. So you always want to keep a high-resolution digital scan in PDF in a very, very safe place. And that safe place will be in the cloud.
You want to make sure that wherever you are in the country or the world, you can access those documents from the cloud.
You may need to access them from your phone, computer, desktop, or laptop, as long as they are stored in the cloud.
And lastly, having those documents enables you to manage repetitive tasks that require the same exhibit, the same document, to be used over and over and over and over and over again.
#7 Failing to Share Your Relationship With Family and Friends
You want to avoid the mistake of not sharing your relationship with your friends, family, and coworkers early on. I will tell you why this is important.
It’s important because it’s proof that what you have is a bona fide relationship. Bona Fide is a real relationship, as defined by normal behavior, regular activity, and typical events that tend to occur in the relationship.
Your relationship must conform to that if you want to give yourself the best chance of being accepted as a bona fide relationship and pass the USCIS investigation.
The best way to do that is to share the start of your relationship with everyone around you, and then share its evolution as well.
You want people to know when you first visited her country and when you developed feelings for them.
Friends and family will know that you and your fiancée had chemistry. They will see that you two have been talking via instant messaging, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, or a similar service for the last five months.
They will know about these things. Your family, friends, coworkers, colleagues, and business associates need to know about this.
At some point, you may need to reach out to them and ask them to write a letter for you. That letter will be used in your petition to confirm that you have a bona fide relationship and that you are of good moral character.
You need them to write a letter addressed to USCIS stating what they experienced when you shared information about your lover with them.
So let others see your choice in a mate or fiancée, girlfriend or boyfriend. Let them see why you made that choice and what is working for you.
Let them experience the positive evolution of your relationship, then ask for their opinion, and start talking about it.
Also talking about traditional women and how you know you’re really into that. And then those folks —family friends and colleagues — will incorporate that information into their letter to USCIS as a reference.
And that makes it feel genuine. So you’ll always want to invite everyone to write a referral letter for you to put in your USCIS petition.
And those, my friends, are the seven things, seven mistakes that you want to avoid when you are first starting your K1, K2, or K3 Visa petition with the USCIS.
Avoid those seven mistakes, and you stand a perfect chance of having your petition go right through to the next level —USCIS —and on to the National Visa Center.
From there, it gets forwarded on to the U.S. Consulate of the country of your fiancée’s hometown.