Get Hitched

March 22, 2007 6:19 AM

My finance and I are planning on getting married in March 2008. She is from the West Indies and I am from the States. We would like to get her Visa application started sooner rather than later. Because of that, we thought we would get a marriage license / civil ceremony now so that we could get the Visa process going while we save money and plan for our proper wedding in 2008. So....where is a good place in the States to get a license / civil ceremony? Can we go to Vegas and get all this done in one day? Is there a typical waiting period between filing the application and actually getting the license? What's the easiest state to get married in? What about legislation regarding marriage? Help us get hitched!
posted by kaizen to law & government (15 comments total)

In most states it is relatively easy to obtain a license which entitles you to get married within a certain timeframe (ie. the next 180 days). If you live in a well developed county your county courthouse should have a FAQ on their website about these matters.
posted by Burhanistan at 6:23 AM on March 22, 2007

Worry about the license once you've got the visa: you absolutely don't need one before, and it's likely to expire by the time USCIS does its thing.

Here's a table of the various state laws regarding marriage, which includes the waiting period and validity. Vegas is probably easiest, but you're talking about the difference between 'easy' and 'Britney Spears drunken joke wedding easy'.
posted by holgate at 6:31 AM on March 22, 2007

Oh: if by 'civil ceremony' you mean an actual legal marriage ceremony while your fiancée is visiting the US on a tourist visa, don't even think about it: it will cause all sorts of problems with the bureaucrats. If she's already resident in the US on a non-immigrant visa, that's a bit different.
posted by holgate at 6:35 AM on March 22, 2007

A good friend recently went through this process. I asked him for some advice:

- As holgate suggested, getting married first will slow things down.
- You want a K1 fiancee visa.
- He says: "If I could only offer one piece of advice, it would be a link to www.visajourney.com. All the answers are there, all the forms, all the tricks"
posted by kableh at 6:49 AM on March 22, 2007

I assume she's not a permanent resident and you are a US citizen. Is she currently in the USA? Will she be returning to her country of citizenship before you marry, or after? Are you planning to marry while she's in the USA on a tourist visa? It's not possible to give you useful advice using the information in your question alone.

Getting married is the easy bit. You can do that legally in a few days at most, just about anywhere, few questions asked. Maintaining her legal permission to remain (and work, if necessary) in the USA, and her acquisition of permanent residency is the tricky part. There's a lot of officialdom to deal with and more than one way to do it. Start here.
posted by normy at 7:30 AM on March 22, 2007

There are two options here, depending on whether she's already living in the US or not.

If she's living in the US, there is no visa:
(1) Check her status. Is she currently in-status and legal?
(2) Get hitched
(3) File I-485 to adjust status and some associated other forms. If she is not in-status, it would not be a bad idea to take an initial consult with an immigration lawyer to see how bad her not-in-status is. If she is not in-status, she must not leave the US under *any* circumstances until she has the green card in her hand.

If she lives outside, the US, ***DO NOT GET MARRIED FIRST***.
(1) Apply for K-1 fiancee visa
(2) When she eventually gets here, get hitched
(3) File I-485 and associated forms.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:07 AM on March 22, 2007

The "if she's here" approach might be different if she's here on a student visa and has a home return requirement.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:08 AM on March 22, 2007

Yes I'll third www.visajouney.com. Your biggest worry is the USCIS not getting a marriage license which is comparatively easy. If she enters the US on a fiancee visa then you have 90 days to get married, I'm sure that's long enough to get a license in any state.
posted by ob at 8:09 AM on March 22, 2007

or you could try visajourney.com
posted by ob at 8:09 AM on March 22, 2007

If she is not in-status, she must not leave the US under *any* circumstances until she has the green card in her hand.

Unless you apply for advanced parole as part of her AOS, but you'll find out all about that when you research this.
posted by ob at 9:04 AM on March 22, 2007

Unless you apply for advanced parole as part of her AOS

Even then I would not fuck with it, unless it was to say goodbye to a dying parent. AFAIK, just because you have AP doesn't mean that the border agent can't say "Fuck you" and slap a multi-year ban on you.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:51 AM on March 22, 2007

Well, that's true. I came back into the country last week on AP for the second time (the last time I traveled with my wife, this time I was alone) and I was interviewed for 15 minutes by a rookie agent. Then after I was paroled I got taken aside by another agent, just for the hell of it. This week everything is different though as we went for our interview and I got the green card stamp. Phew! The moral of this story is, do research, do everything by the book and remember that nothing is certain until you get the green card...
posted by ob at 11:07 AM on March 22, 2007

My experience was a little different with advanced parole (what genius came up with that charming name?). My green card application took over 4 years and each time I needed to leave the country I had to take a least a day to wait in line to file the form at the local INS office, prove that this truly was an emergency (doctor letter from parent's doctor, for instance) and have actual air ticket in hand. There was also a charge for this.

AFAIK, as long as you have the real AP paperwork there's no chance that a border agent can say "F** you" and bar you, although they do make you feel like a criminal and it takes 4x as long to clear incoming immigration.

Thw whole process is a monstrous pain in the butt and really an embarassment to an advanced country. Even if you are 100% legal, well-employed, honest, etc. you get a constant runaround. I ended up hiring an immigration lawyer because I got tired of my paperwork getting lost and repeated demands for new medicals ($300 a time), photos, supporting paperwork, etc, because te INS had been sitting on their hands for a year without taking any action on my case.
posted by raoulm at 12:43 PM on March 22, 2007

AFAIK, as long as you have the real AP paperwork there's no chance that a border agent can say "F** you" and bar you

Looking around, people who are waiting for their green card and have AP do get banned sometimes, even in spite of their AP. This happens when the person had been in an overstay before they left.

That is, if Future Mrs. Kaizen has overstayed or is otherwise not fully legal right now, she should not leave the country, even with AP, except in the direst of circumstances.

It's advance parole, not advanced. As in, you got the permission ahead of time.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:00 PM on March 22, 2007

Thirteenkiller? Are you too busy with your honey to comment on this? :)
posted by k8t at 1:16 PM on March 22, 2007