Do you have a spouse who has kids who are citizens? If you’re married to someone, and they have kids who are over the age of 21, and they are a citizen, I want to tell you that that person might be able to petition for you. Or they might be the basis for you for being able to get you your green card. Now, Here’s the rule. Here’s the trick. Here’s the important piece: you have to have married your spouse, the mother of this child, or the father of this child before the child turned 18.
So immigration law is kind of funny where a lot of times the kid is a kid until they’re 21. Except in this type of circumstance, I’m sure there are others. But in this type of circumstance, you have to be married to the child’s mom or dad before the child is 18 years old. This way you are legally, in the eyes of immigration law, their step parent. And here is what happens, I want to give you an example. I’ll use me and my husband. If I marry my husband, Sean, and he has another child from a prior relationship and that child is 15 years old: I am for immigration purposes, that child’s stepparent. So even if you get divorced in that circumstance, you are still that 15, 16, 17, 18, 21 year old child´s stepparent. As long as you continue to have a relationship with that child as they become an adult.
Now, what’s really important here is even if this step child doesn’t want to petition for you, if you got married to that mom or the dad of that child before they are 21, we can still help you use that relationship. We can still help you get your green card or work permit through that child having status in this country and you being their step parent. So this is just one of the ways that we can help you that perhaps not everyone is talking about and that you maybe not have heard about.
We really try to think outside of what is normal, outside of the box a little bit because it’s so important when immigration laws are so difficult. It’s so important that as your attorney, we look at every single option and find creative ways to help you get status in this country. Most of our clients have been in the country for 15, 20, even, 30 years, and they don’t have status yet. And I say yet, because when you work with us, our number one objective is for you to go from being unlawfully here to a resident!
Hillary Walsh is one of America’s foremost immigration attorneys — a nationally recognized advocate whose career has been built case by case, client by client, in the most challenging corners of immigration law.
For over a decade, Hillary has represented immigrants, asylum seekers, trafficking survivors, and families facing deportation in proceedings before the Ninth, Sixth, and Fifth Circuit Courts of Appeals, the Board of Immigration Appeals, and immigration courts across the country. Her legal expertise spans removal defense, asylum, VAWA, T Visa, U Visa, green cards, and naturalization — the full breadth of immigration law, with particular depth in protection-based relief for vulnerable populations.
Her work has reached the highest levels of American jurisprudence. Hillary was invited to author an amicus curiae brief for a U.S. Supreme Court case — a distinction extended to attorneys whose command of immigration law is recognized at the national level.
Hillary founded New Frontier Immigration Law in 2019 with a simple but radical belief: that every person deserves a fighting chance, and that there is a solution for every problem. That legal philosophy has guided thousands of client outcomes across Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and communities nationwide.
She doesn’t just represent clients in immigration court; she shapes how immigration law is argued, understood, and applied.
(623) 320-0400