If you came to the United States on a B-2 tourist visa, fell in love, got married, and are now trying to get your green card — this article is written for your situation specifically.
Because the new USCIS policy memo that dropped in May 2026? In a lot of ways, it was written with your situation in mind. We want to be straight with you about what that means — not to scare you, but to give you an honest take from an immigration lawyer so you can make informed decisions about what to do next.
My name is Jacob Tingen. I'm the managing partner at Tingen Law in Richmond, Virginia. We handle family immigration cases from across the country. With USCIS Policy Memo PM-602-0199 now in effect, the tourist-visa-to-green-card path is one we're thinking about most carefully for our clients right now. Here's what you need to know.
Why the New Memo Was Written With Your Situation in Mind
When you came to the United States on a B-2 visitor visa, the government's expectation was simple: you were going to visit, and then you were going to go home. That's how a tourist visa works. You're admitted temporarily, for a specific purpose, and you're expected to leave when that purpose is over.
When instead of leaving, you stayed — because life changed, because you met someone, because you got married — and you applied for your green card from inside the United States, that process is called adjustment of status. It is a legal process. It's available to you. And it has been available to people in your exact situation for a long time.
What PM-602-0199 does is instruct USCIS officers to treat your choice to stay and adjust — rather than going back home and applying through a US consulate — as an adverse factor they can weigh in their discretionary analysis.
Here's what's important to understand clearly: it is a factor, not a bar. Not an automatic disqualification. A factor that gets weighed alongside everything else in your file.
But we're not going to sugarcoat it. The memo was written, in large part, about people who came as visitors and then stayed to build a life here. Your fact pattern is exactly what the "failure to depart as expected" language describes. Let's talk about what that means in practice and what to do about it.
This is also not a change to the immigration statute. B-2 entrants who marry US citizens remain eligible to adjust status under INA § 245. What changed is that officers are now instructed to actively consider and weigh that choice as part of their evaluation of your whole application.
The 90-Day Rule — and How the New Policy Adds a Second Layer
If you've heard of the 90-day rule, here's the quick version: under the Foreign Affairs Manual, if you entered on a visitor visa and took steps toward permanent residency — got married, filed for a green card — within the first 90 days of your entry, USCIS can presume you misrepresented your intent when you came in. That's a serious problem.
After 90 days, that presumption flips. It works in your favor on that specific question.
But here's what the new memo adds on top of that. Even if the 90-day timing works in your favor — even if your marriage happened well after you arrived, even if your entry narrative is clean — officers are now separately asking: why did you choose to stay and adjust instead of going back home and consular-processing?
That question is now live regardless of when your marriage happened. The 90-day rule and PM-602-0199 are related, but they're not the same question. The 90-day rule is about timing and intent at entry. The new policy is about the discretionary evaluation of your whole application, including the choice you made to stay. Both need to be addressed in a well-built application.
If You Came on a J-1 Visa — There Is an Additional Issue
This section is specifically for people who came as au pairs, nannies, or participants in other J-1 exchange visitor programs and are now married to a US citizen.
Many J-1 visa holders are subject to what's called the two-year home residence requirement under INA § 212(e). If this requirement applies to you, you generally cannot receive certain US immigration benefits — including, in many cases, a green card — until you've either returned to your home country for two years or obtained a waiver of that requirement.
This is not something you can file around or hope gets overlooked. If you're a J-1 holder pursuing a green card, the first question isn't even about your marriage — it's whether this requirement applies to you. Not all J-1 holders are subject to it, but many are. Waivers exist, but they require a case-specific analysis and their own separate process.
If you were a J-1 au pair or nanny, do not file a green card application without talking to a lawyer first. This is exactly the kind of issue that derails a case when it's not addressed before filing.
What "Failure to Depart" Means for Your Application in Practice
The adverse factor the memo elevated — "failure to depart as expected" — doesn't mean your application is disqualified. It means the story of your entry, and the choice you made to stay, needs to be clearly and honestly told in your application.
If you entered with genuine visitor intent and life genuinely changed — document that timeline. When did you arrive? What were you actually doing here? When did the relationship become serious? When did you decide to stay? The longer the gap between your entry and your marriage, the more clearly your visitor activity at the time of entry matters. Evidence that you were actually living as a visitor — travel records, tourist activity, the timeline of when the relationship developed — all of it is relevant.
Inconsistencies between your entry documents and your adjustment narrative are now higher-stakes than they were before this memo. If your application tells a story that doesn't quite hold together, or conflicts with other records, that is a more serious problem under heightened discretionary review.
The application that runs into trouble is the one where the entry was on a tourist visa, the marriage happened quickly, and the documentation is thin. That's the file that gets scrutinized. A clear, consistent, documented timeline of how your relationship developed is what separates a strong application from a vulnerable one.
What Your Application Specifically Needs
Here is the practical translation of everything above.
- An honest, detailed entry narrative. Not a template paragraph — a real account. When you came, what your actual intent was, when things changed, and why. The true story is almost always the right story, but it needs to be documented, not just asserted.
- Financial documentation of your shared life. Joint bank accounts with regular, ongoing activity. Tax returns filed together. Both names on the lease or mortgage, on the car insurance, on the utility bills. If you have children together, their birth certificates, school records, and pediatrician files belong in the application. A USCIS officer who has never met you needs to look at your file and conclude: these two people have a real, shared life. They live together. They're building something together.
- Proactive handling of anything complicated. Status gaps, any period of unlawful presence, prior overstays, prior inconsistencies in immigration history — those things don't get better by being ignored. Under this policy, they get weighed more actively. Get a lawyer's eyes on your full history before you file.
- Careful thought about consular processing. Some people ask whether they should just leave the US and apply through a consulate instead. This requires deliberate analysis, not a default assumption. If you've accrued more than 180 days of unlawful presence and then depart, you can be barred from returning for three years. More than a year triggers a ten-year bar. For many people in this situation, leaving to "do it the right way" creates more risk, not less.
Additionally, consular processing decisions carry different — and more limited — avenues for review than domestic adjudications. Do not make that choice based on a headline. Talk to a lawyer who can look at your specific history first.
The Bottom Line
The path isn't closed. Real marriages with genuine, documented histories — those applications are still getting approved. What has changed is that the quality of your application now determines the outcome more directly than it did before.
This is not a situation where you want to file on autopilot. The details of your specific timeline, your specific entry, your specific documentation — those are what determine how this goes under the current policy.
This is the kind of case where the details make all the difference. Tingen Law has been handling these cases for over 13 years. We represent clients nationally, and the case evaluation is free — bring your timeline, your entry documents, and your records of your marriage. We'll give you a real assessment of where you stand.