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As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing K-1 Fiancé Visas as well as US Marriage Visas in the category of the K-3 Marriage Visa as well as the IR-1 or CR-1 Immigrant Spouse Visa which confers Green Card status upon entry to the United States. 

What are we talking about with regard to K-1 Visa abandonment? Well unfortunately, the adjustments of status process has become something of a prolonged and quite honestly neo-Soviet slog in dealing with what can only be described as a barely functional or semi-functional Immigration apparatus in the United States which seems to be mostly concerned with being obtuse and just simply trying to quite honesty just slow down what was once a very fast process. What am I talking about? Well at the one time we would send folks back to the United States - primarily fiancées of American citizens from Thailand - generally speaking, the American citizen was male and the Thai fiancée was female. That said we have dealt with many other types of cases where the gender roles are reversed as well as many same-sex cases since the time of which it's been possible for those folks to avail themselves of such Immigration benefits. 

That said, what are we talking about with regard to bringing somebody in and then dealing with the Adjustment of Status process? In the past it was a matter of weeks. Literally the view was "hey you have been through the whole K-1 Fiancé Visa process, we're not going to put you back through a prolonged process of dealing with your Adjustment of Status." In the past, generally speaking we would assist people by filing those cases in the United States and then it was a matter of processing six or eight weeks. Unfortunately those days are long gone and unfortunately now, you are lucky to get this thing done oftentimes within a full year of arrival in the United States. What that has resulted in was people were detrimentally relying on the old process and now they are entering the country and they are realizing look I have got to move around, I need to leave the United States, I need to take my now spouse - generally speaking people come in to the US on the Fiancé Visa, they marry their American citizen counterpart and then they go ahead and apply for adjustment of status. Well sometimes Advanced Parole may process out in such a time period that your Adjustment of Status may be timely and good, it may work out perfectly fine and you make get travel optimization. Unfortunately now with the advent of the fact that no longer do employment authorization documents come with the dual mandate of Advanced Parole automatically, which somebody's brilliant idea that they weren't going to do that anymore, and it's resulted in people basically saying look we need to just abandon this K-1 case because I need to move back abroad or I need to go abroad to work and I want to take my now spouse with me. What are the options? 

Well if you leave the United States before an Adjustment of Status is fully processed i.e. before a Green Card is approved and issued, then you are going to be dealing with the situation wherein you have to essentially start back over anew and go through the US Immigration process as a person married now to an American citizen oftentimes. Again it depends on circumstances but this isn't something most people exactly want to do. More and more, depending on circumstances and cases, I am veering people away from the K-1 to begin with. That said, depending on your circumstances it still may be the optimal travel document. That said if you do abandon a K-1 case, yeah you are going to have to start again from scratch. Now you may be able to deal with the K-3, although that said you are still going to deal with an underlying petition for an Immigrant Spouse Visa.

So it's my observation and I guess I could say prediction, that in the future if we do see abandon K-1 cases where the couple has in the interim gotten married, we're probably going to be seeing a lot of Immigrant Spouse cases processed out on the back end of that scenario. That said moving forward remains to be seen if the K-1 adjustment process improves, we don't know, but we will certainly keep you updated on this channel as the situation evolves.