A physician from India married a U.S. citizen weeks before her tourist status ran out, adjusted status, and had what she described as a friendly interview. Three months later there is still no green card, and her expedite request just came back denied. On the Immigration Answer Show, attorney Jim Hacking told her the problem may be less about any single form and more about how the whole file reads.
She entered on a B-1/B-2 in April 2025, married near the end of her six-month admission, and filed her I-485 about two weeks after the wedding. The interview was April 28, 2026. The officer, she said, complimented the wedding photos and told her to expect a decision within a week. Nothing came. She had a hospital job lined up to start July 1, so she filed an expedite. It was rejected.
Hacking’s first concern was her profession.
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“I think doctors are probably held to a higher standard here and they’re going to think that you came to get married to find someone so that you could get a work card so you could work as a doctor.”
He was blunt about the silence since the interview.
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“I don’t think they like you. I don’t think they like your timeline.”
None of that is a formal ground of denial. Adjustment of status under 8 U.S.C. § 1255 (INA 245) is discretionary, which means an officer weighing the case is also weighing impressions. In this file that means the short visit, the marriage late in the stay, and an I-485 filed two weeks after the wedding, all landing in a row. The caller herself noted the officer blamed the wait on a separate April 27 background-check memo. Hacking did not buy that as the real reason and said the firm’s litigation is aimed at the May 2026 adjustment-of-status policy, not the background-check announcement.
The expedite, in his view, made things worse.
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“I actually think if I were your attorney, I would have told you not to file those expedite requests … it just seems like this case is geared a little bit more towards being able to work in the United States and less about a marriage.”
The employment authorization document that comes with a pending I-485 is issued under 8 C.F.R. § 274a.12(c)(9), and there is nothing improper about needing to work. But pressing hard for the work card, he said, can signal the wrong thing.
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“That you seem sort of desperate to work in the United States.”
Hacking allowed the read might not be fair. The caller and her spouse had chosen to stay together and adjust in the United States rather than consular process, and were told EADs were running two to four months; hers had been pending eight. That is a reasonable explanation. The point is that a discretionary officer does not have to accept it, and the paper trail of repeated expedites gives them something to point at.
Two practical takeaways came out of the call. First, the answer to a stalled work card is usually not another expedite but a lawsuit, the same EAD delay litigation that is moving these cases when USCIS sits on them. Second, the marriage case itself is won by building a discretion record that answers the timeline question head-on, rather than by asking the officer to hurry. For a professional whose file already invites the work-card suspicion, that record is the whole ballgame.