Can Your Visa Get Revoked After Approval? Here's What You Need to Know!

Let's say you go to your visa interview and instead of getting approved, the consulate or embassy says, sorry, we are going to send your visa back to USCIS for possible revocation. What does that mean? How does this play out? What do you need to know? And more importantly, what can you do to actually win and get your visa approved? If you don't already know me, my name is Josh Goldstein and I'm an immigration lawyer. I created this channel, Immigration Station, for you to try to help you reach your immigration goals by giving you clear information, tips, insights, hacks, and also inspiration. You can do it. Don't give up. You can reach your immigration goals. Revocation of a visa. What's it all about? How does it work? What do you need to know? If you have an interview for a visa, that means that an underlying visa petition has probably already been approved. If your case is based on marriage or you're applying for your parents or your children, you filed a visa petition called the I-130. If your case is based on asylum, it's an I-730. If it's based on employment, it's an I-140. And if it's based on investment, you have the I-526. Once you get to the interview, the consulate is not required to issue your visa just because USCIS approved the visa petition. The consulate can make its own decision whether to approve or deny the visa. And if they don't like your case, if there's something that troubles them about your eligibility for the visa, what they'll do is they'll send it back to USCIS for possible revocation. And they'll tell you this. At that point, your case kind of goes into a black hole because the consulate, if you ask them and say, what's the status of my case? They'll say, we don't have any information at all about your case because it's gone. We sent it to USCIS for possible revocation. And if you ask USCIS, hey, the consulate sent my case to you from their files, USCIS will say, sorry, we don't have your file yet. So your case is kind of lost in limbo. Eventually, you will get a notice of intent to revoke from USCIS. In the notice of intent to revoke, USCIS will give you a chance to respond and they will outline for you all of the reasons why they think that your approved visa petition should be revoked. Most of the time in our practice, we have cases based on marriage that get this. And a lot of the times, the key issue is that the consulate simply isn't persuaded that the underlying marriage relationship is genuine. It's not enough to be legally married. You have to prove that you have a genuine and bona fide marriage relationship. And that's often quite challenging to do when one of the spouses is outside the US and one of the spouses is inside the US. They're separated. So a lot of times, the consulate is just not persuaded. You have an opportunity to respond and you can submit additional evidence to persuade them that it is genuine. You can submit affidavits, you can submit photos, proof that you spent time together, that you went on trips together, text messages, correspondence, WhatsApp correspondences, whatever kind of evidence that you can come up with. This is something that me and my team can help you respond. You should be aware that if you have a fiance visa petition, it plays out a little bit differently. And unfortunately, not as well. If you go to a visa interview for a fiance case and the consulate isn't persuaded that your marriage relationship is genuine or for whatever reason, they say to you, sorry, your case is sent back to USCIS for possible revocation. If that happens, it's game over. Because what you'll do is you'll get a letter from USCIS that will say your fiance visa petition is denied because it expired. I know that sounds ridiculously unfair, and it is, and I agree. But nevertheless, this is the way it works out. So if your case didn't work out and you didn't get approved at your visa interview and your case was sent back for revocation and you had a fiance visa, then what I usually recommend is that couples consider getting married and refiling a case based on marriage. Because if you refile the fiance visa, which was just denied, you're basically doing the same thing again and hoping for a different result, which I think, according to the old saying, that's what insanity is, where you do the same thing and you expect a different result. You might have a case based on an investment or employment. The issue might not be a marriage relationship. Your case might be different. But essentially, you're going to get a notice of intent to revoke. You're going to have an opportunity to rebut the allegations against you to respond. If you're successful, your visa petition will be affirmed and it will be sent back to the consulate for processing and visa issuance. You're very likely to get your visa approved at that point because they've already denied you and you won. So what else can they do to you? The problem at that point comes in because your case is going to be subjected to a delay. We see this all the time. USCIS and the consulate and the National Visa Center, they simply don't have, in my experience, they don't have an organized way to process cases in this scenario. If you have gotten your visa petition affirmed after receiving a notice of intent to revoke, that's great. But you should be aware that you might get subjected to a delay. And the solution to that is to file a writ of mandamus lawsuit. File a lawsuit to challenge the processing delay. Now, if you want to know more about how the lawsuit works when you get a delay, you've got to watch this next video right here where I explain everything you need to know.