Traveling abroad BEFORE entering the US

alexis.schreier

New Member
Hey all,

My fiancée and I live in France together. I'm a US citizen so I am the petitioner wanting to bring my fiancée into to the US so we can live there together.

Once our visa is approved, BEFORE moving to the US, we would like to take a vacation to Thailand since my fiancée won't be able to travel abroad for a while after entering the US with her K1 visa. We would like to travel to Thailand for a few weeks, then come back to France to gather our things, then make the move to the US.

My question is: is it unrecommended to travel abroad once you've obtained the K1 visa from the embassy but BEFORE you've entered the US? Or is it fine to do so?

Thanks in advance.
 
No problem.
Thanks for your reply :)

No problem as in it's not a problem to travel abroad before entering the US?

Could you tell me what your answer is based off of, or link any online resources that confirm this? Not that I doubt your answer, it's just that I haven't been able to find anything about this topic online :)
 
Thanks for your reply :)

No problem as in it's not a problem to travel abroad before entering the US?

Could you tell me what your answer is based off of, or link any online resources that confirm this? Not that I doubt your answer, it's just that I haven't been able to find anything about this topic online :)

You probably haven’t been able to find anything about it because ...it’s not prohibited? (If it was prohibited you would certainly find the rule saying it was?) Why wouldn’t you be able to travel before immigrating somewhere?
 
You probably haven’t been able to find anything about it because ...it’s not prohibited? Why wouldn’t you be able to travel before immigrating somewhere?
I agree with you it makes sense, but I just want to be sure.

Just to play devil's advocate, suppose after going through the medical check-up and getting the visa approved, we travel abroad to Thailand for a few weeks and after coming back to France, we decide to enter the US. Could the customs agent see that we went to Thailand and decide that the medical exam is now void because it was done before we went to a country where we could have potentially contracted an illness? On the travel state gov website, Thailand has an alert for Dengue, which is a mosquito-borne illness.

I know it's probably unlikely but I'm trying to think of any possible scenarios where they could refuse entry because of something like this.
 
I agree with you it makes sense, but I just want to be sure.

Just to play devil's advocate, suppose after going through the medical check-up and getting the visa approved, we travel abroad to Thailand for a few weeks and after coming back to France, we decide to enter the US. Could the customs agent see that we went to Thailand and decide that the medical exam is now void because it was done before we went to a country where we could have potentially contracted an illness? On the travel state gov website, Thailand has an alert for Dengue, which is a mosquito-borne illness.

I know it's probably unlikely but I'm trying to think of any possible scenarios where they could refuse entry because of something like this.

The only traveling I’d personally be concerned about would be to a security risk country (Iraq, Afghanistan etc), and that might get you secondary but it would take a lot for a CBP Officer to deny entry to someone on an immigrant visa. I honestly can’t speculate about what is “possible”, as that is infinite. All I can say is that in the absence of being told you can’t travel anywhere with or with communicable diseases of public health significance (of which dengue is not on the list by the way), you can either play it totally safe and not go anywhere till you enter the US, or just follow your plans. As one counter argument to your view, though, is the fact that TB is on the list of diseases and many countries have endemic TB. If the reasoning is that people might get ill sometime after the medical, people would be obliged to leave such countries as soon as they got their visas? But they don’t.
 
Top