How This Couple Got a Marriage Green Card Approved With No RFEs (Marriage Adjustment of Status in 2026)

A Marriage Green Card, Filed and Approved Without a Single RFE

A U.S. citizen and his wife, originally from the UK, had spent years apart and wanted to finally settle together in the United States. Their marriage was genuine and their situation was uncomplicated. What stands out about how their adjustment of status went is that they prepared and filed the whole thing themselves, never received a Request for Evidence, and were approved at the interview.

Their full conversation: the portal, the packet, the interview, and the approval, is on our YouTube channel here.

Choosing adjustment of status over the fiancé route

Like a lot of couples, they started out assuming the K-1 fiancé visa was their only option, because it's the route that surfaces first when you begin looking. The more they researched, the clearer it became that adjustment of status was open to them and made more sense for where they actually were. It also happened to be the faster way to be together.

They didn't rush into it. There was an earlier point when they looked into moving forward and decided they weren't ready, so they held off and kept gathering information. "I like to know as much as I can before I move forward," the wife said, and her husband approached it the same way. When they finally committed, it was because the timing was right, not because they felt pressured into a decision.

The first real obstacle was finding clear information

Adjustment of status through marriage isn't talked about openly the way the fiancé visa is. When they went looking for solid explanations, there wasn't much out there. The husband described it as feeling almost hidden — a path that existed but wasn't really discussed. None of it was hard to understand once it was laid out; the difficulty was finding where to start and what order things went in.

Once the sequence was visible, the whole thing settled down. A process that had looked overwhelming became a list they could work through one item at a time.

Splitting the work and checking each other

Both of them worked on the application. This wasn't a case of one spouse handling everything while the other supplied documents — each completed their own sections, then they went over each other's before anything was filed. At one point the husband caught a mistake in her forms: she'd written the dates the British way around, day before month, and they fixed it before it ever went out. "I'm still struggling with the dates out here, because they do it the opposite way around," she admitted.

Two things sped them up. The first was knowing which sections didn't apply to them at all. The walkthroughs they were following flagged what was relevant to their situation and what they could skip, an interpreter section, for instance, when no interpreter was involved, which saved real time and energy. As the husband put it, not having to read a section you already know is irrelevant to you "saves you so much mental energy." The forms are long and full of questions that invite overthinking, and knowing what to leave alone mattered as much as knowing what to fill in.

The second was that they trusted their own accuracy enough to file without anyone else reviewing it. They'd watched some of the form walkthroughs three and four times, filled everything out, then gone back over it again. By the time they were done they were confident there were no mistakes. They sent the packet overnight to confirm it arrived, and tracked it through to delivery.

The timeline

From sitting down to prepare the forms and evidence to having everything finished took about two weeks. They could have done it faster but chose not to rush. The medical exam came near the end, by which point the rest was already complete.

The work permit was approved within about a month of biometrics. After that came a long quiet stretch, nothing happened for months, until the interview was scheduled for late February, the better part of a year after filing. Through all of it, no Request for Evidence ever came. Avoiding one had been a personal goal of the husband's, and the way they prepared made it happen.

The interview

The officer started out direct. He asked each of them to say why they were there, and when the husband initially answered for his wife's green card, the officer stopped him — each spouse needed to speak to their own part. Once that was sorted, the tone shifted. The officer mentioned that the husband was the first person that day to answer the question correctly. He also noticed they were both veterans, which gave them something in common, and the conversation eased from there.

He chose not to dig into the relationship at all. The evidence they'd submitted made it obvious, and he said as much. That evidence had been put together with care: photos paired with short written descriptions, love notes and gift receipts kept over the years, pictures with each other's families, all organized into one clear file. They brought the deed to the house they'd bought and an ultrasound to the interview as well. The case was approved, the notifications came within a day or two, and the card arrived in the mail roughly a week later.

What a reader in a similar position should take from this

Their facts were simple, but simple cases still get delayed or flagged when the steps are out of order or the evidence is a mess. What made the difference here was knowing what to do first, which parts of the forms to skip, and how to present the relationship so there was nothing left to question in the room.

There's a line the husband used that gets at it: he didn't like the idea of someone else handling his case, because an attorney juggling many files could miss something he'd never know about. Doing it himself meant he knew exactly what had gone into the packet he was sending. For anyone weighing the same decision, control over the process comes from understanding it, knowing the route, the order, and what each stage asks of you before you start.

The route this couple followed, knowing the order, the decision points, and what each stage asked of them before they started, is what the Marriage Immigration Method lays out, from adjustment of status through removal of conditions and naturalization. If you want to see where your own case starts and the sequence ahead, begin with the Orientation.

This article is for general educational purposes. It is not legal advice. For questions about your specific situation, consult a licensed immigration attorney.