How This Couple Responded to an RFE and Got a 10-Year Marriage Green Card Approved (Marriage Adjustment of Status in 2026)

A Ten-Year Marriage Green Card, Approved After a Single RFE
A U.S. citizen and his wife, originally from Canada, married later in life and set out to 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 it themselves, handled a Request for Evidence without outside help, and were approved at the interview with a ten-year green card.

Their full conversation, from choosing to run the case themselves through the RFE, the interview, and the approval, is on our YouTube channel here.

Choosing to keep control instead of hiring a firm

They began by trying to do it themselves and quickly found it more complicated than expected. Too many questions had no obvious answer:

• which documents were required

• what the timelines were

• how long the Canadian spouse could remain in the country and

• when the green card application should actually begin.

Underneath sat a set of cross-border questions about a house in Canada, property in the U.S., and whether taxes were owed to one country, the other, or both.

Looking for footing, they paid for an hour with a local immigration lawyer. Through the entire hour, every question they asked sent the lawyer to a search engine for the answer. They left knowing that was not the help they wanted.

Cost was never the deciding factor; clarity was. The husband, an engineer, wanted to understand the process and keep control of the facts, and he had read enough accounts of applicants going months without hearing from their attorney to be wary of handing the case off. "I would rather understand the process myself," was his position.

The turn came from a set of videos they found online. Early on, they asked a question and got an immediate, specific answer, "turn to page 37, section C." The precision told them they had found something built by someone who knew the process thoroughly.

The first real difficulty was finding clear information

The path itself was not hard to follow once it was laid out. The difficulty was finding reliable information and knowing what order things went in. Both spouses were educated, native English speakers with no prior immigration history, which made handling the case themselves realistic rather than a gamble.

What they leaned on was a system built specifically for married couples: educational diagrams, a list of the documents to expect, the questions and issues likely to arise, notes on how particular items should be completed, and recordings.

They could work at their own pace and check their own progress. Reading other couples' questions in the same place mattered more than they expected. A process they had been navigating alone began to feel less isolating.

Splitting the work and checking each other

They decided early that one person would own the paperwork. Rather than both editing every form and wearing on each other, the more detail-oriented spouse took it on, generated most of the application, and ran the finished pieces past the other for accuracy before anything was filed.

He built it methodically. He set up a folder structure on the computer, bought a copy of Adobe Acrobat to complete the forms electronically, and collected everything the case needed in one place: birth certificates, bank records, background history, the marriage certificate, a degree, a divorce decree, and photographs documenting a shared life.

Some items required detours. The divorce decree on file was marked only "copy" rather than certified, so a certified version had to be ordered from the provincial records office in Canada.

Assembling the full application took about two months. They did not file for a work permit, since the immigrant spouse had no intention of working, a choice that slowed the arrival of a Social Security number later but kept the filing simpler.

Responding to the Request for Evidence

After filing, the case drew a Request for Evidence on two points: a long form birth certificate and taxes.

The birth certificate was the harder of the two. The document the Canadian spouse had used for more than seventy years was a small card that did not list her parents' names, and it was not accepted. Replacing it meant going back to the provincial records office, which searched its archives by hand because the birth predated computerized records.

The search took about six weeks and produced the original handwritten record her parents had signed on the day she was born, a document she had never seen before.

The tax item was more procedural. They were filing together while she still had no Social Security number, which made the paperwork slower to gather. Once it was submitted, it was accepted. In both cases the approach was the same: follow the letter's instructions exactly, send in what it asked for, and nothing more.

The timeline and the ten-year card

The evidence response went in around October, and the interview notice did not arrive until the following March. Midway through the process, policy shifted and in-person interviews became mandatory again, even for straightforward cases. The delay was unwelcome at the time and ended up working in their favor.

Because the interview fell about two weeks after their second wedding anniversary, they were approved for a ten-year green card instead of the two-year conditional one, which removed the later step of removing conditions altogether.

The petition was approved first, and the application to adjust status about a month after that. The formal notice never really arrived on its own; the notice and the physical card showed up at nearly the same time. Roughly a month after the interview, Social Security began.

Start to finish, the process took about a year and two weeks, longer than the six to nine months they had expected, and long enough to add real stress before the ten-year card made the wait worthwhile.

The interview

The night before, the immigrant spouse felt uneasy. Even with a genuine marriage and a clean case, the interview carried weight, made heavier by a house already sold to buy the home they now shared and the fear of being told to leave a country they no longer had a fallback from.

The day itself was smaller than the worry. Construction in front of the downtown field office meant parking farther away and walking over. In the waiting area, they watched other applicants come out without smiling, several accompanied by lawyers.

They had brought two binders of supporting documents and photographs, and the officer opened none of it. He asked who had prepared the paperwork, told them it was very well done when they said they had done it themselves, and requested one thing: another copy of the birth certificate. The interview lasted about ten minutes, with no attorney and just the two of them in the room.

One remaining worry resolved itself afterward. The green card was issued in the new married surname while the Canadian passport still showed the former one. On a later trip home and back, the mismatch caused no problem, as officers matched the photo to the passport, saw the green card, and waved them through. They had brought the marriage license in case anyone asked. No one did.

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 a document falls short. What made the difference here was knowing what to prepare, keeping one organized person in charge of the paperwork, and responding to the RFE with exactly what was requested and no more.

Asked whether they would do it again the same way, they said yes, themselves and with the system's assistance, but not entirely alone. As the husband put it, "Not 100% alone."

A general immigration lawyer may not specialize in marriage-based cases the way a couples-focused process does, and their comfort in English and lack of prior complications were part of what made self-management the right call.

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 begin. One detail they could not have planned is worth watching for: an interview that lands after the two-year mark is what decides whether the card is good for two years or ten.

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.