Yesterday, just one day before leaving Alaska before heading south again to Antarctica, Michiel and I had our dreaded interview with the Department of homeland Security/Department of Immigration for our "Marriage Fraud" interview. Any couple who request a green card after 2 years or less of marriage receive only a conditional permanent residence status. This was the case with us. Michiel received a 2 year green card and, believe it or not, it is time for renewal. (at least for us the time flew by)
We applied for removal of conditions on his residency in January and have been struggling to coordinate the interview appointment with our travel schedule (as you can imagine, explaining that you can't be at an interview in Alaska because you are in Tanzania, Iceland, the Netherlands, etc., etc. is something you can only do once.) We begged the office by US post and phone calls to schedule the appointment before Oct 3, received an appointment for Oct 11 and then finally got our appointment for yesterday.
Over the past 3 months, we have been collecting any evidence of a "real" marriage that we could gather - joint bank statements, beneficiary statements, letters from friends and families attesting to our relationship, photos and joint tax returns, but we were called in for investigation for a fraudulent relationship because we didn't have any of the big items.....mortgage, children, you know....stuff that responsible adults have :)
The interviewer, JR, was a surprisingly atypical federal employee...friendly, helpful and he went above and beyond by doing his background investigation and making a determination DURING the interview rather than afterwards. He appreciated that we were on our way to Antarctica and did everything to be sure that we could leave today.
So you're wondering if he asked us about favorite colors, leaving the seat on the toilet up, which leg he puts into his pants first? He didn't ask any of those things. He DID videotape us, but that was so that his supervisor could evaluate his performance.
He asked us about where we have been in the last several months, why I called from Denver last month, how we met, what we do in Antarctica, what we do in Hope and basically had an easy conversational style that made it easy for us to talk about ourselves.
The real clincher, though, was this weblog. Once we could show real documentation of all the travels we've made together (with photos), he was convinced that we couldn't live this kind of life if we didn't love one another. He also had me translate some of the Dutch on the weblog. When I was able to do that for him, I'm sure he figured that no one would bother to learn Dutch for a "fake" husband!
The result of this positive news is that Michiel will get a 10 year residence permit which allows him to live and work in America. Yahoooooooo!
