With regard to an I-526 petition, when should the police certificate be obtained and filed?

Police clearance certificates are required at the second stage to conditional permanent residence which is upon approval of the I-526 during the consular processing of a foreign EB-5 investor to obtain their immigrant visa to the U.S. It is advisable to ensure there are no inadmissibility grounds based on criminal convictions (if any) prior to filing the I-526.

That is required to file for conditional permanent residency, which comes after approval of the I-526, which may take at least 12 months to obtain. So you have some time.

Police certificates are not required at the I-526 stage. They are submitted to the National Visa Center during the immigrant visa processing stage. Police certificates are either valid for six months or one year depending upon the country and type of police clearance.

For consular processing, you will need the police clearance at the second stage of the permanent residence processing (after the I-526 is approved and when you are ready to proceed with the immigration visa processing). The only timing issue would be to make sure that the police clearance certificate is as recent and up to date as possible in line with the submittal of your immigrant visa application. Also, in certain jurisdictions or countries it may be time consuming to obtain the police clearance, so you want to plan ahead.

Before the representation of the EB-5 investor starts, one needs to determine whether there are any grounds of inadmissibility on the basis of a criminal conviction. The police certificates may disclose inadmissible grounds. The police certificate will usually be required to be filed with the applications for conditional permanent residency through the U.S. consulate.