[Please note: The Client’s name and case key details may have been altered to preserve the identity of the client. This Success Story is not intended to be an offer of service or case plan. Every case is unique. The Success Story is presented for information purposes only.]
In 2021, we helped Lorenzo, a legal permanent resident of the United States, secure the same status for his beloved wife, Vicki, who he had met in 2019 on a vacation to his homeland of Mexico where members of his family introduced them.
Obtaining a green card for Vicki was easy; we filed all the paperwork in November of 2019; her interview, delayed due to the Covid 19 pandemic, took place in October of 2020, and she was approved for a marriage-based green card at the end of January of 2021.
Regarding the interview, one of the factors that really helped Vicki was that Lorenzo’s young daughter, Sarah, who accompanied us to the interview, obviously viewed her as a second mother; on this matter, Vicki’s name appeared on the contact card at her school along with those of Lorenzo and his first wife, Crissy, who was Sarah’s mother.
Oddly, Crissy was involved in our previous case with Lorenzo that took place in 2015-2017 when we secured for him a green card based on his marriage to her.
That one was a bit more difficult because in his teenage years in the 1990’s, Lorenzo was, by his own admission, “a delinquent youth” who had amassed a total of four convictions in two states for such crimes as “criminal mischief” so our team had track down dispositions on all of them.
The biggest impediment to Lorenzo’s obtaining legal permanent residency, though, was the fact that Lorenzo and his mother, Sofia, now deceased, came to the United States from Mexico as EWI’s (entries without inspection) in 1990 and Lorenzo didn’t believe that anything had been done to adjust his status since then.
In conversations with him, though, it was revealed that within a couple of years after their arrival, Sofia had married a man who was a legal permanent resident who filed for his new wife a I-130 (Petition for Alien Relative) in 1993. Subsequently, our investigation revealed that Lorenzo, who was under eighteen at the time, had been grandfathered onto that petition.
Sadly, Sofia passed away, due to an illness, before she could acquire a green card, so the I-130 petition was cancelled for failure to be timely used, but it still was eligible as an enabling element for Lorenzo to qualify for 245 (i) relief under the Life Act of 2000. Thus, our team was able to obtain a marriage-based and later a permanent green card for Lorenzo.
Shortly thereafter, however, Lorenzo and Crissy dissolved their marriage although they remained friends and Crissy, now remarried too, was very happy for Lorenzo that he was able to find someone as wonderful as Vicki, as was their daughter Sarah, and as was our team.
