B-2 Extension RFEs Are Now Immigrant-Intent Traps for AOS Filers

A caller on the June 9 Immigration Answer Show described a request for evidence her attorney is now seeing repeat across files: an RFE issued on a pending B-2 extension that names the applicant’s later marriage-based I-485 as USCIS’s reason for doubting the original tourist intent.

The caller, identified on air as DC, entered the United States in August 2023 on an F-1 student visa, completed Optional Practical Training, and at the end of OPT changed status to B-1/B-2. USCIS approved that change, then approved a B-2 extension request several months later. Two months into the first visit-visa period she had moved in with the boyfriend she had been seeing. She married him in April 2026, filed a marriage-based I-485 disclosing unauthorized employment, and shortly after received the RFE on the still-pending second B-2 extension request.

The legal mechanism the RFE positions is INA § 212(a)(6)(C)(i) — material misrepresentation. A finding that the applicant willfully misrepresented a material fact when seeking the B-2 or its extension attaches to the I-485 and bars adjustment unless an INA § 212(i) waiver is approved based on extreme hardship to a U.S. citizen spouse.

That waiver is not a formality. The framework set out in Matter of Cervantes-Gonzalez, 22 I&N Dec. 560 (BIA 1999), measures extreme hardship only as to the qualifying U.S. citizen relative — hardship to the applicant herself is expressly outside the test. Routine consequences of separation do not satisfy the standard.

What makes the RFE pattern operationally new is the PM-602-0199 posture USCIS adopted on May 21, 2026. The memo directs adjudicators to weigh “conduct inconsistent with the applicant’s stated purpose of entry” as a negative discretionary factor in the I-485 adjudication. The pending B-2 extension is the most efficient evidentiary vehicle for officers to manufacture that conduct finding before the green-card interview ever arrives.

The State Department’s old “30/60-day rule” — replaced in 2017 by the 90-day misrepresentation guidance in 9 FAM 302.9-4(B)(3)(g)(2) — no longer binds USCIS adjudications, but the underlying analytical template survives in adjudicator training. Conduct inconsistent with nonimmigrant status within roughly three months of entry triggers a rebuttable presumption of misrepresentation at the consular level, and USCIS officers reach for the same framework when timing patterns on a domestic file mirror it. Moving in with the U.S. citizen petitioner two months into a B-2 change of status, then filing an I-485 inside the validity of a follow-on extension, checks every box the framework was written to flag.

Three operational consequences follow for applicants already in the sequence.

• Withdrawing the B-2 extension is not a clean exit. USCIS retains the record of the original B-2 filing and any conduct described in it. Withdrawal avoids a denial decision in the file but does not unwind the underlying misrepresentation analysis the I-485 officer will conduct.
• Responding to the RFE invites a written finding. A B-2 denial that expressly cites § 212(a)(6)(C)(i) is far harder to dislodge at the I-485 interview than the absence of one. Any RFE response must be drafted with the green-card consequence — not the B-2 outcome — as the controlling concern.
• The I-601 waiver is the contingency to prepare now. Hardship documentation for the U.S. citizen spouse — medical, financial, psychological, country-conditions — takes months to assemble. The Cervantes-Gonzalez factors should be mapped to the spouse’s record before any adjustment interview is scheduled.

The B-2-then-marriage sequence is not isolated to one caller. The June 9 broadcast included three separate fact patterns where USCIS appeared to be reading the timing of a marriage filing back into earlier nonimmigrant applications. The host, attorney Jim Hacking of Hacking Immigration Law, described the second B-2 extension as the agency’s preferred attack surface.

The protective record an applicant in this position can still build is the documentary one: hotel and Airbnb confirmations, travel itineraries, return-flight bookings, and bank statements showing payments aligned with the tourist activities the original filings described. DC told the show she had submitted that evidence with both the change of status and the extension. Whether it survives the discretionary review PM-602-0199 prescribes now depends on how the timeline of the marriage and the timeline of cohabitation with the petitioner overlay onto the timeline of the B-2 filings — the layered-timeline analysis officers are being trained to perform.