Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing K-1 Fiancé Visas, Adjustment of Status and married names. This is something that will cause consternation from time to time sometimes amongst clients and things, and needlessly so, because the fact of the matter is married names, what I would call Common Law married name, you take your husband's name at marriage, it is cosmetic to the process of US Immigration. 

Now I know people get very overwrought about this and I come at this purely from an Immigration Attorney's perspective, but the fact of the matter is it really is cosmetic, okay? What are we talking about here? Well you go through the K-1 Fiancé Visa process which unto itself takes quite a bit of time to get that process through the Department of Homeland Security, the National Visa Center and then ultimately the US Embassy here in Bangkok. You get the visa issued, they get on a plane they come to America, you get married, you file for Adjustment of Status within the 90 days and then you are pending processing of that for some number of months. And going through the looking down the barrel of three years of the Trump Administration, God knows how long Adjustment of Status is going to be taking moving forward but okay, you go through that process. She eventually gets her Lawful Permanent Residence - I'm going to presume it's a she, most of our cases are coming out of Thailand at least right now - she goes ahead and gets her Green Card, her Lawful Permanent Residence but she's still got her maiden name. Well this is very, very common. People ask me about this all the time, well not all the time, but it comes up. My general advice is get through the US Immigration process and then worry about name changes after, because you need to as smoothly as possible move through the plenary process of getting Lawful Permanent Residence, which again under this Administration is something of an onerous process and then deal with name changes. 

First of all, just because in your Immigration documents it has the maiden name, does not mean that pursuant to American Common Law that person is not now known as Mrs. John Jones or whatever the husband's name is, that is a fact of the US Common Law. In fact it's sort of an automatic plenary mechanism of the US Common Law if you will. So that in and of itself, again I see people that have a lot of consternation especially on the back end of this process, where they get upset, and oftentimes I kind of get upset when they get upset at me, because they have seen all the documentation, they understand that they are processing on their maiden name, and I guess they think automatically they are just going to have a new name. Now part of that misunderstanding may come from the fact that during the naturalization process, whereby you are becoming a US citizen, there is a one-off name change opportunity, that just sort of automatically happens during the plenary process of becoming a US citizen. That's not what occurs with regard to Adjustment of Status to Lawful Permanent Residence. 

So the thing to take away from this video is to understand, if you are going through the K-1 and eventually the adjustment, generally speaking it is a better idea to just presume and understand and expect that at the end of that tunnel, that final Green Card issued, is going to initially have the maiden name on it. You then have the opportunity to change the name, but understand, it's the underlying immigration status that is of concern, the name is merely cosmetic if you will.