In some cases for our I-130 spouse clients, one spouse is an immigrant and the other is a natural-born citizen. In other cases, both spouses are immigrants but one of them has been naturalized.
In October of 2018, a woman from Bosnia came to see us about helping her husband apply for an I-130. Indira, the woman, was naturalized in 2006 and wanted to help her husband, Rafael, stay in the U.S. after overstaying his visitor visa.
Indira was born in Bosnia, later moved to Austria, and then arrived in the U.S. in 2000. Rafael was from Brazil, in the U.S. on a B2 visa, and met Indira in a bar.
They were married in 2018, and in October they came to us to help Rafael stay with Indira.
Attorney Ashley Moore filed their I-130 case in November of 2018, but shortly received an RFE.
The RFE requested Rafael's long-form birth certificate, not the short-form birth certificate that was sent in.
Generally, the short-form birth certificate is the kind of birth certificate that most people would recognize; it has the town/city/state of birth, along with the parents' names and dates of birth.
However, the long-form birth certificate typically has all of the information you would see on a short-form birth certificate but may include the time of birth, the parents' home addresses, signatures of those present at the birth, and sometimes fingerprints of the parents and the child.
Like many people, Rafael didn't know that there was such thing as the long-form birth certificate, and subsequently didn't know where to get his.
Rafael was able to call his mom, who tracked down his long-form birth certificate and sent it to him.
Once the long-form birth certificate was given to Attorney Ashley Moore, we were able to send it to USCIS in an RFE response.
In July, Rafael was approved for his green card and is now a permanent resident!
Now Indira and Rafael are thinking about moving to Florida, the state where they were married.
To learn more about short-form and long-form birth certificates, click here. To learn how the Attorney Ashley Moore and other Attorneys from the Hacking Immigration Law can help you, call our office at (314)961-8200.
