Living on the Border to Be With a Spouse While the I-130 Is Pending

A U.S. worker whose I-130 for his wife had been pending 17 months asked the Immigration Answer Show whether he could move to the Canadian or Mexican border, live with his wife on the other side, and cross into the United States to work eight-hour shifts. He worried it would look suspicious. Founding attorney Jim Hacking’s reaction was the opposite.

Nothing in the law penalizes a petitioner for choosing to live near his spouse while a petition is pending, and Hacking said he has had doctors do exactly this across the U.S.-Canada border. Closing the distance is not a warning sign. It tends to reinforce the one thing every marriage case has to prove, which is that the relationship is real.

Where he lives is not the problem. The 17-month wait is. Hacking does not treat USCIS’s posted processing times as meaningful, and he does not make people wait for them to expire before acting. Once an I-130 delay crosses into unreasonable territory, a federal mandamus action under 28 U.S.C. § 1361 forces a decision, and the agency rarely fights these because the approved petition just has to move on to the National Visa Center anyway. He estimated a suit filed now would get this petition approved and sent onward in roughly two months.

The move and the lawsuit solve two different problems. Living across the border lets the couple be together in the meantime; the suit ends the wait. Neither one needs permission from USCIS, and someone who has already waited well past a year should stop hoping the case moves on its own. The same goes for anyone who has waited past the point of reasonableness on a stuck I-485, and it runs through the firm’s pre-litigation and mandamus strategy for cases the agency has simply parked.