Flames rage through forest in Chile

You have options if green card application is delayed

If I marry my fiancée after her fiancé(e) visa expires, can she still get her green card? Her K-1 stay will expire on Feb. 12. If we marry after that date, can she nevertheless get her green card without leaving the United States?

Name withheld Yes. Your fiancée may interview for her green card in the United States. The process is called “adjustment of status.” However, she will need to file USCIS form I-130, Petition for Alien Relative with her form I-485, Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status.

When a U.S. citizen brings a fiancé(e) with a K-1 status, Customs and Border Protection admits the fiancé(e) for 90 days. If the couple does not marry within those 90 days, the fiancé(e) falls out of status. Nevertheless, because the person entered legally and is married to a U.S. citizen, he or she may adjust status — not based on the fiancé(e) petition, but rather by a relative petition filed by the U.S. citizen spouse.

My U.S. citizen wife and I submitted our forms to USCIS so I can get my green card last March. We are still waiting to hear back. Our lawyer says we must wait another 10 months before it is appropriate to start pressuring USCIS about the status of our case. By then we will have been waiting more than a year.

How can I find out the typical waiting time for a case like mine? If my case is unusually delayed, what are my options?

Juan Carlos, Mansfield, Texas You can check USCIS processing times at egov.uscis.gov/ processing-times.

USCIS is still trying to catch up because of the backlog caused by the COVID lockdowns, so for some types of cases, the waits are unusually long. If your case isn’t processed within the USCIS targets and your lawyer isn’t able to get the agency to act, try contacting your U.S. representative or senator, asking them to inquire for you. If that doesn’t help and the delay is unusually long, you can sue USCIS in federal court. In what is called a mandamus action, you are asking the court to order the agency to decide the matter. Sometimes just the filing of a mandamus action gets USCIS to act.

Volunteers carry supplies for firefighters near wildfire in Puren, Chile, on Saturday. Forest fires are spreading in the southern and central parts of the South American nation, triggering evacuations and the declaration of a state of emergency in some regions.