EB-5 conditional residence rests on the investment rather than on a marriage, so a divorce does not by itself end anyone's status, and a child who turns 21 after being admitted as a conditional resident keeps the green card. Conditions come off through Form I-829, Petition by Investor to Remove Conditions on Permanent Resident Status, which the investor files in the 90 day window before the second anniversary of admission, with the spouse and children included on that single petition. Death of the principal investor is the hardest of the three events and the one that needs a lawyer within weeks.
Form I-751 has nothing to do with EB-5
Search the phrase "removing conditions" and most of what comes back describes marriage based green cards under section 216 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Wrong statute. EB-5 families hold conditional residence under section 216A, and the rule that governs them is 8 CFR 216.6, the regulation on investor petitions to remove conditions.
Nothing on the EB-5 side has a good faith marriage waiver. There is no battered spouse waiver here either, and no extreme hardship waiver, because no marriage has to be proven in the first place. An adviser who hands an EB-5 family a Form I-751 checklist is working from the wrong chapter of the manual, and that error turns up often enough that checking the form number on every draft you are shown is time well spent.
Divorce inside the two year window
Termination of EB-5 conditional residence turns on the money. USCIS can end it when the enterprise was never established or when the capital was not sustained. Fraud is its own ground. Divorce appears nowhere on that list.
Your former spouse's problem is access, not eligibility. Their conditional residence has to be lifted by an I-829 that reports on your investment, and 8 CFR 216.6(a)(1) requires any family member left off the investor's petition to file one of their own. A separate filing still has to prove the same investment facts, which a former spouse usually cannot see from the outside.
So negotiate for the paperwork while the divorce is being negotiated.
Write into the settlement agreement exactly which documents the investor will hand over and by when. Name them: the subscription agreement, the escrow release confirmation, capital account statements, the regional center's project updates, copies of every USCIS notice. A vague cooperation clause is worth very little at 3 pm on day 89 of a 90 day filing window.
What the ex-spouse has to prove
Nothing about the marriage needs proving. The money does. A separate petition has to show that the $800,000, or $1,050,000 where the project sits outside a Targeted Employment Area, stayed at risk for the required period. It also has to show 10 full time jobs per investor created, or on track to be created within a reasonable time. Our page on EB-5 Conditional Green Card: Keeping Your Investment At Risk for I-829 covers what sustaining capital means in practice.
Dates matter as much as documents. Conditional residence began on the day of admission with the immigrant visa, or on the day Form I-485, the adjustment of status application was approved, and each family member carries their own date, the same one where the family entered together. An approved I-829 removes the conditions as of that second anniversary. It does not reach back to the start of the two years.
A birthday does not undo a green card
Once a child has been admitted as a conditional permanent resident, turning 21 changes nothing. Turning 25 changes nothing. Getting married changes nothing. The child holds residence in their own right and stays on the investor's I-829 as a dependent until conditions come off for the whole family.
Derivatives do not each file their own I-829 while the family is intact. One petition covers the investor, the spouse and the children who obtained conditional residence together, which USCIS also sets out on its overview of conditional permanent residence.
Naturalization clocks run from that same first day, because the conditional period counts toward the five years of permanent residence. A child who landed at 20 can usually file Form N-400, the application for naturalization at 25. After conditions are removed, the 10 year card is renewed on Form I-90, and no work permit needs renewing once someone holds the card itself.
Where aging out really bites
Before admission, not after.
A derivative child has to be under 21 when the immigrant visa is issued or the I-485 is approved. Section 203(h) of the Act, the Child Status Protection Act formula, softens that by subtracting the time the investor's petition sat at USCIS. Take the child's age on the date a visa number became available, subtract the days between the receipt of Form I-526E for regional center investors and its approval, and the difference is the CSPA age. The child must also seek to acquire permanent residence within one year of visa availability.
Here is the part that catches families out. CSPA subtracts adjudication time only. Time spent waiting for a visa number in a backlogged category is not subtracted, and for investors from a country with a long EB-5 queue that is exactly where nearly all of the waiting sits. The statutory text lives at 8 U.S.C. 1153, whose subsection (h) carries the age calculation.
Two things help a family with a 19 year old. Reserved visa categories created by the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022, 20 percent rural, 10 percent high unemployment and 2 percent infrastructure, have moved faster than the unreserved pool, which shortens the wait that CSPA cannot fix. Concurrent filing does the rest: when the category is current and the family is already in the United States, the I-485 goes in the same day as the I-526E, which satisfies the one year requirement immediately. See EB-5 Concurrent Filing 2026: Get Work and Travel While Your Green Card Is Pending.
If the investor dies
The family does not lose its status.
There is a paragraph of the regulation on exactly this. 8 CFR 216.6(a)(6), headed death of investor and effect on spouse and children, says that where an investor dies during the two year conditional period, the spouse and children stay eligible for removal of conditions provided the evidence listed in paragraph (a)(4) can still be produced. The same regulation lifts the requirement that a family member left off the investor's petition file one of their own.
Eligible is not automatic. Somebody still has to pull the capital records and the job evidence out of a regional center that was dealing with the investor, then file inside the same 90 day window. That is work for the first few weeks, not the first year.
And the investment still has to behave. Whoever administers the estate has to leave the capital where it is until the conditional period ends, because the surviving family's I-829 still has to show sustained capital and the jobs. Selling the limited partnership interest to settle an estate can destroy the immigration case the estate was meant to protect.
Documents to hold from day one
- Passport pages showing the immigrant visa and the admission stamp, for every family member
- Both sides of each green card, scanned the week the cards arrive
- Marriage certificate, plus the divorce decree if one issues, with certified translations
- Children's birth certificates naming both parents
- Every USCIS receipt and approval notice, including the I-526E approval
- Annual project reports and capital account statements from the regional center
Check current adjudication estimates on the USCIS processing times tool before assuming there is time to fix a missing document. A family in the middle of a divorce gets no faster service than anyone else.
For what conditional residents may and may not do while all of this is pending, read EB-5 Conditional Resident 2026: Real Rights, Limits, and Hidden Obligations alongside Traveling Abroad on a Conditional Green Card.