@Anonymous wrote:
@ZenManI am sure your lawyer had to tell you guys about 2 year conditional period?
Yes, we both were aware that the Green Card my spouse was granted was a provisional one, and that in two years, we'd have to reappear before USCIS to have that provision lifted. We were also advised that if we were no longer married at that time and my spouse wanted to continue on her own down the path towards citzenship, she'd have to apply for a waiver (since she'd essenitally be "sponsorless"). Those waivers are not easy to come by -- they're granted if there's evidence of abuse (not applicable here); if she needed asylum (because returning to her homeland could put her in danger, which wasn't applicable here); or if we divorced for a legitimate, defensible reason. That last option would have been her best shot, but you can imagine that it wouldn't look good to governemnt officials when an Alien with a marriage-based Provisional Green Card abandons said marriage mere weeks after she receives her Green Card. It also wouldn't look good when USCIS would learn that I had to hire someone to track her down, serve her with divorce papers, and then that she agreed to the divorce without any push-back whatsoever. (We were divorced three months after she was served.) To this day, I have no idea where she is, but I was advised to leave a formal statement of my version of events with a USCIS official, just in case in her attempt to get a waiver to have the provision lifted from her Green Card, she said something untruthful about me (like I beat her repeatedly, for example). I also submitted affadavits from several close friends and my physician attesting to my own emotional state after her abandonment.
And then I moved on . . . . .
Again, you’re the winner here!
Congratulations on all that you’ve managed to accomplish by picking yourself up, dusting yourseloff, and trying again!
What an absolutely kind thing to say! Thank you!
Of course, I didn't feel like much of a winner in the immediate aftermath of all this drama, but now that a bit of time has passed and things have stabilized somewhat, life is indeed good. It's funny, but I thought it'd be easier to find love again than to be considered creditworthy again after all my recent missteps. But thanks to all the generous souls on this forum -- and the incredibly useful insights they provide! -- I'm much further along in my rebuild than I thought I'd be.
In "the garden" and smelling the roses . . . .