On the eve of deportation …

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 17, 2001 | by Jamie Dettmer

Visiting a regional Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) center is instructive, especially in the run-up to that season of traditional good cheer, Christmas, when families gather for warm reunions and charity is at the fore. And so here in Baltimore immigrant families come if their Green Card process is still to be completed to apply for advanced parole papers allowing them to travel overseas, to seek employment-authorization renewal or for a host of other matters required by immigration rules so byzantine that they make the IRS code look simple.

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free." Some immigrants would argue that if you weren't tired and poor before, you certainly will be by the time the INS has finished with you.

Take the following case of a British journalist and Ids family. In December 1999, the journalist applied for a change in immigration status and filed two weighty volumes in support of an application for an Exceptional Background One (EB1) Green Card. According to INS guidelines, an EB1 application should be adjudicated within 90 days, but in his case it took eight months for the sleepy INS to get around to approving the request. No doubt the service was too busy chasing bad guys in those pre-Sept. 11 days.

The next stage in the process then commenced. Fingerprints of the family were taken, employment papers secured and advance parole documents obtained for employment and humanitarian reasons. The little family waited patiently, like thousands of others, for their final interview and the Green Card stamp to be affixed in their passports. Months went by; the year was almost up. The employment cards soon would expire, likewise the parole papers, and even the deadline on the fingerprints was approaching.

Several phone calls to the misnamed INS information hotline were made, but they failed to elicit any dens about getting an interview date. "Good luck," one officer cheerily said. "Have a nice day," said another. Contacting the regional service center also proved ineffectual: a voice message referred callers to the national information hotline.

Eventually, after Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) intervened, the INS provided an interview date -- Jan. 16, 2002, a date 14 days after the expiration of the employment papers and a month after the parole papers expired. The INS apologized it couldn't expedite the case, there being no humanitarian grounds for doing so.

And so the journalist and his family forked out $200 in fees to renew the employment cards because of the 14-day gap and $285 for parole papers, necessary if they were to visit the journalist's ailing parents in London at Christmas.

Armed with all the family's passports and INS paperwork, the journalist went off to Baltimore to apply in person for the parole papers. "We can process your application but not your wife's and son's," declared the abrupt INS clerk. "They have to do it in person so we can make sure they're here."

"But I have their passport," the writer reasoned.

Exasperated, the clerk responded: "They have to fill in this questionnaire; your son as well." This was said as she was looking at the boy's photograph. The journalist surveyed the questionnaire, a document promising that the applicants are not illegal immigrants (something that should give a would-be terrorist pause for thought).

"My son can't complete the form."

"Why not?" snapped the clerk.

"Well, he is only 4."

Silence ensued. "Okay, I'll take your application and your son's, but not your wife's; only a lawyer can file for her if she can't come in."

"Why a lawyer? Why not a family member?"

The frustrated clerk: "Because a lawyer is under threat of perjury."

The equally frustrated journalist: "But perjury charges can apply to anyone, lawyer or not, if they lie."

A week later, on Nov. 20, the wife went off to apply for her parole papers in person. "We've got a problem," snapped an INS clerk. "A family member of yours came in last week and applied for parole papers," she said accusatively, adding a little sheepishly, "We can't find the file now." A few hours later, after a new file had been created, the relieved wife returned home clutching triumphantly the valuable document, only to hear from her husband of another INS problem, this time even more serious.

Employment-card renewals now are taking three months to process instead of 30 days. Despite the fact that their renewal applications were filed in mid-October, the chances, he revealed, were high that they wouldn't be completed in time, thereby placing the couple in technical violation of INS rules. And the consequences? Either losing their jobs because of the 14-day gap or being deported for breaking the rules.

Would the INS help the family to keep their jobs or avoid breaking the law? No, guidelines dictate it can't check on a renewal application for three months after the date of the filing -- in this case, about three weeks after the expiration of the original employment authorization.

And who is the journalist? The writer of this column. So next year, unless common sense on someone's part rears its head, political notebook may become "special report from overseas."