9 month period outside of US (with trip at 5 months)

[sam1356]

Hi,

I am applying for citizenship on spouse path, and wondering how I can handle a pandemic related situation.

- Got married in 2016, got green card in 2019, husband got citizenship in 2020
- Lived in following locations
- New York City 2016 to Oct 2020
- Upstate NY Oct 2020 to Sep 2021
- India Oct 2021 to June 2022 to help old parents (made a trip to US at 5 month mark to find job/apartment for a move to California)
- Came back to Upstate NY in June to pack up stuff (3 weeks), then moved to CA
- Been living in CA since July 2022

For my residence locations, I have put my parents house in India from Oct 2021 to June 2022. Under travel outside US, I don't have anything more than 180 days, since I made a trip to CA after 5 months.

I did not have a lease agreement while I was at my brother's place, but we were occupying their bottom level of a multi floor house [1]. All our credit cards and other documents used this address (including tax returns), and we filed NY state taxes during the time we were out of the country, and my husband was still working for his NY based company for entire time. I was unemployed and looking after our two babies.

I spoke to a lawyer that suggested we put either 1) we put our brothers address for the time we were in India, or 2) put both addresses as residences for this period. Does anyone have suggestions or recommendations on how to handle this situation?

Thanks


[1] During the pandemic, we moved from the city to the countryside to be close to my brother's family. We initially got an apartment for 10 months since we didn't know how long before we needed to return back to the city for work. After 9 months, we moved in to our brothers place. Our old parents in India needed help during the height of the pandemic and we went there to help out. We were not sure how long we will have to help out, and it took 9 months for us to get them into a stable and safe state. After the 9 months, we returned back to my brother's place for a few weeks, and packed our stuff and moved to CA. During this time, our stuff was at my brother's place, but we didn't have a car or any gym memberships etc during this period as we had decided to move to CA post pandemic.

[okccanary]

I am going to start of saying I am not a lawyer and i always error on the cautious side but here is what i would do/think.

Part of the requirements to become a Citizen is to have good 'moral' standing. Personally, I would not use your brother's address while you were in India. It would be pretty easy for the officer to see this as a false statement as he would be able to quickly check your arrival/departure dates from looking up your passport records and see that you were claiming to be living with your brother while you were in India. If you want to risk it then you could perhaps use both addresses. I'm making up dates for example but maybe you could say Brothers house 2019-2022 and India for 2021-2022 and then explain in the interview that NY was always your base and intended place to live but you had to go back for the family emergency.

Personally, I believe that the 9 months out in India may have reset your continuous timeline. Just because you came back for a week or so the combined time is still more than 6 months in a one year period. Once again I am not a lawyer and this is my personal view about that requirement.

Personally, I would just count June 2022 as my new reset point and apply for Citizenship when I hit the requirements using that as my starting point. I understand the want and need to become a citizen asap and if you applied now then you may get lucky and have an easy experience or you may have an officer who is a complete nightmare making this a very stressful experience. I would just wait that extra year and a bit for a guaranteed less stressful and way easier experience. But as previously states I always take a more cautious approach to life.