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USA Visa Thailand: Embassy Rules and Police Background Check

Transcript of the above video:

This video today is going to briefly discuss Thai police clearances in the context of US family immigration from the Kingdom of Thailand. To be clear, I am speaking specifically in the context of say fiancée visas or marriage visas although police clearances may be necessary for other types of non-immigrant categories so there may be some pertinent information in this video for those who are not necessarily seeking those types of visas.

The Thai police clearance is an issue of note oftentimes to folks, mostly because, especially in cases involving an American citizen petitioner, that individual has probably never dealt with the Thai police let alone obtained any documentation therefrom.  Basically, just so you are aware, or the viewer is aware a Thai police clearance is necessary before consular processing can be completed on a visa application after the initial petition for say a K-1 fiancée visa or US immigrant visas has already been processed.  So basically, on the back end of the overall process at the US Embassy here in Bangkok, they are going to ask in what’s called ”packet 3“,  that’s one of the packages that is involved with the immigration processing at the Consulate, they basically ask for this police clearance. Essentially what it does, is exactly what the name implies, sort of self-evident. The police clearance is basically a police background check and they are going to go ahead and check the court records, the police records to see if an individual who is seeking admission into the United States has ever had any issues, arrests here in Thailand. It should be noted that police clearances can oftentimes result in the finding of a grounds of legal inadmissibility so like if there is a criminal record in a given case, the police clearance is going to stipulate that and the police clearance, and that as then going to be used as grounds of inadmissibility as far as the US Embassy is concerned, as far as the Department of State is concerned, when of those grounds of inadmissibility comes up, the way to remedy a ground of inadmissibility is by filing, well it’s not the only way, but in most cases, the way to remedy  a ground of inadmissibility is through what’s called an I-601 waiver filing, there’s another video regarding waivers on this channel, but back to the main point, when obtaining a police clearance, basically one needs to get fingerprinted and have their name run through the system and checked by Royal Thai Police. As part our services here at the firm, one of the things we offer is a Thai attorney will accompany our clients down to the National Police Headquarters to obtain said police clearance and that individual will generally be able to go ahead and sign a limited power of attorney which will allow our staff to go back and retrieve the police clearance, as the police clearance generally takes 7 to 10 days to go ahead and get issued. Thai Police clearances: they are a pretty integral part of US immigration process because Immigration has a mandate, I should stay the Department of State has a mandate to undertake due diligence to ascertain whether or not they are letting in convicted criminals into the United States and obviously they don’t want to do that on a routine basis or at least they don’t want to do that without further adjudication.  So police clearance is fairly important. Something else to note is that in those cases that are immigrant visa cases processed through the United States of America, the National Visa Center takes matters pertaining to  police clearances quite seriously as again, it is part of the Department of State’s mandate to go ahead and ascertain the criminal background of an individual seeking admission to the  United States so the National Visa Center in those cases, is going to go ahead and deal with the back ground check, the police clearance. Another thing to note about police clearance is in the context of US immigration is that if an individual has lived, it is usually my recommendation, if an individual has lived for 6 months or more in a jurisdiction abroad and they have lived in that jurisdiction after their 18th birthday, it is probably going to be prudent to go ahead and just get a police clearance from that third country jurisdiction just to go ahead and forestall any so called 221g refusal requesting further evidence.  For information pertaining specifically to the 221(g) request for further documentation, or 221(g) refusal as it’s also called, I recommend checking out the video on this channel specifically talking about 221(g)s but to sort of rap up here regarding  police clearances, here in Thailand, you are going to be able to get one of those from Police Headquarters where you are going to go ahead and again get your fingerprints taken, run through the system, and if it’s a Thai national , probably in those cases where it’s a Thai national who has never really been outside of Thailand, that‘s all that is going to be  necessary. For those that have spent significant amounts of time abroad outside of Thailand, and not the United States, a third country, it may be necessary to go ahead and get a police clearance from that third jurisdiction and third party jurisdictions, each jurisdiction has their own methodology for issuing police clearances. There are even certain jurisdictions in which police clearances are either not issued or not required by the Department of State for whatever reason. So third country jurisdictions, it would take, essentially, there would be hundreds of videos on this channel for each country specifically, so if it doesn’t pertain to Thailand it may be necessary to  research further regarding police clearance issuance in countries that aren’t the Kingdom of Thailand.