ROCIO D. WOODY

Your Waiver is Approved

Last Christmas one of my patients came by to bring me a token of her appreciation for working on her case. She was static that her husband’s waiver had been approved and he had a date to go to his country of origin and receive his US Immigrant Visa. I congratulated her and her family and looked forward to continuing to serve her family. Recently, she called desperate, crying, and with extreme difficulty, she shared that her husband was denied a visa once he appeared in the US Embassy in his country. Instead, he was handed a letter indicating that he “basically” had to re-start the waiver process. No explanation was provided. She was inconsolable and all I could offer was to reach for the most hopeful explanation and rationalize the decision as “it was not a final denial.”  Yet, she was devastated and so were their children; all of them minors, United State Citizens. Once we ended the conversation, I thought this as a misfortune. Thousands of cases travel around the world, no system is perfect and it could have been that their supportive documentation was misplaced or somehow lost in the system.

However, today I learned of another case in the exact same predicament. Another case where the husband’s US Immigrant Visa had been approved and the husband had been given an appointment in the US Embassy in his country of origin. He appeared for his appointment to finalize the process only to receive a denial while at the US Embassy. He did not receive any explanation other than they were asking him to re-start the waiver process.

Both of these cases were memorable because they were so strong. Their extreme emotional and psychological hardship was well supported and their cases had a high probability of approval based on their merits. However, somehow USCIS is finding a way to approve cases while in the US but deny when you are no longer on US soil.

I can only hope and pray these are isolated incidents and not a trend to remove families from the US. It would be utterly despicable to misleadingly remove one family member with the intent to have the other family members also leave the country to maintain their family unit.

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