The United States Consulate in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico was closed for several days over “security concerns.” I had originally heard that the Consulate was simply reevaluating security protocols, but based on several updates over the past few days, it looks like there might have been either a direct threat to the Consulate or a whole lotta violence in Ciudad Juarez. This closure resulted in the cancellation or postponement of numerous visa interviews and added a lot of unnecessary pressure to an already dangerously overburdened consular post – although the Consulate probably had little choice in the matter. As of today, the Juarez Consulate is open for business, although it’s hard to imagine “business as usual” in the face of such a miserable security situation. Mexico’s pseudo-civil war has been slowly destroying the country and killing its citizenry, and now has even started preventing people from leaving the country altogether. The way things have been going, this recent closure in Ciudad Juarez might be the first of many to come for U.S. Consulates in Mexico.
I saw this disturbing story today about three murders in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico – the victims of which were connected in some way to the U.S. Consulate there. According to a story on CNN, one of the victims worked at the Consulate, another was her husband, and a third was the husband of another Consulate employee. A motive for these crimes is not known yet, but Mexican authorities and the FBI apparently think it’s related to one of the drug cartels currently operating in Juarez, which is one of the most dangerous cities on the planet.
Why, you might ask, am I writing about this incident in Got Immigration? The U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez is one of the busiest in the world, handling an incredible amount of immigration cases, including most of the I-601 waivers for Mexican nationals. Aside from being a terrible tragedy for anyone connected to these victims, the murders of a consular employee and relatives of consular employees will almost certainly lead to tighter security at the Consulate, which in turn will make an already stressful and difficult post that much tougher to navigate for many thousands of Mexicans. I also wonder whether the attitude of consular employees will change as a result of these murders. Will they wonder, if I deny this visa, will I be murdered after work too? Will my family members be murdered instead? Although these crimes seem connected to the drug violence that plagues Ciudad Juarez, I would wonder whether, in a city in which life is seemingly so cheap, a decision to deny an immigration case might provide a good excuse for someone to end my life as well. Will adjudicators become more generous when they shouldn’t be, or tougher when they needn’t be? Only time will tell. I just hope that the countless Mexican nationals that pass through the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez don’t become victims of these brutal and senseless murders too.
I saw this article in the New York Times last night about the Encalada family of West Babylon, New York. The article details how immigration law tore apart of the lives of everyone in this family in different ways: a mother and wife lost her husband, a step-son became severely depressed, and a father and husband even lost his life, albeit at his own hand. How exactly, you might ask, did immigration law destroy this family so thoroughly? Segundo Encalada, an undocumented immigrant from Ecuador, married Elizabeth Drummond, a U.S. Citizen, and had three children with her. Mr. Encalada had apparently entered without inspection, which required that he return to Ecuador in order to obtain permanent residence – for which he apparently qualified aside from his unlawful presence issues (he was most likely not grandfathered into Section 245(i), which would have allowed him to remain in the U.S. while he adjusted his status). Unfortunately, a misunderstanding at a party led to his arrest, which in turn led to voluntary departure, which finally led to Mrs. Encalada making the long trip down to Ecuador to attend a green card interview at the U.S. Consulate in Guyaquil. This is where the Encaladas’ story gets truly strange. The U.S. Consulate denied Mrs. Encalada’s petition, saying it was a “marriage of convenience.” I’m assuming that someone showed the Consular official copies of the birth certificates for the three children the couple had together. If that’s the case, how on earth could this be a “marriage of convenience?” Worse, yet, the Consulate apparently had no record of the couple ever being interviewed – and only became concerned whether or not there had actually been an interview (1) after a Congressman from New York became involved and (2) after Mr. Encalada committed suicide by drinking poison.
This story is tragic, but I think even more so because of the bureaucratic nightmare that most U.S. Embassies and Consulates have become over the years. Attorneys are seldom ever able to talk to anyone at a U.S. consular post. Visa denials are essentially unchallengeable, and it usually takes getting a Member of Congress involved to solve even the simplest of problems. U.S. consular posts have become virtual black holes where immigration cases go to die, rather than what they should be: the public image of the United States abroad. The State Department is doing no one any favors by making it impossible for a wife to bring her husband back home with her, and needs to get its act together before stories such as the Encaladas’ become the norm, rather than a subject for an article in the New York Times.
The State Department announced today that it was starting to use a new nonimmigrant visa (NIV) application – the DS-160 – which will one day replace all existing NIV applications. As anyone that has applied for an NIV knows, there are several different applications now – the DS-156, DS-157, DS-158, and a few others, many of which are paper-based. Now, the completely online DS-160 will incorporate all the information from every other form, and I assume that it will be tailored for the requirements of whoever is using it. DOS even stated that applicants will be able to upload a digital photo directly onto the form! Talk about high tech for the government, eh? Only 12 consular posts – including several in Canada and Mexico - will be using the DS-160 for now, but DOS said that it will expand its use as server bandwith can be increased.
There’s been a lot of chatter lately among immigration attorneys about some BAD decision-making coming out of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. A little background:
Persons applying for U.S. permanent residence that have certain “admissibility” issues – in other words, legal impediments to obtaining permanent resident status - have to apply for a waiver of the ground(s) of inadmissibility in question. Some grounds of inadmissibility can be waived, others cannot; similarly, some can be waived while physically in the United States, while others cannot. People that fall into this latter category must apply for a waiver in their home country, a process that almost always takes months, if not years.
Mexican nationals that require an inadmissibility waiver – most often for prior periods of illegal presence in the United States – must apply for their waivers at the U.S. Consulate General in Ciudad Juarez, a gritty, dangerous dump of a city across the border from El Paso, Texas. The law requires that applicants for a waiver of inadmissibility demonstrate “extreme hardship” to a qualifying U.S. citizen or permanent resident relative in the United States. “Extreme hardship” is not just missing your husband that has to return to Mexico; it’s not just earning less money when the family’s breadwinner has to leave the U.S.; it’s something above and beyond the “normal” hardship associated with a relative having to leave the country, if such a thing as “normal” hardship can even be said to exist. Good waiver cases often involve sick family members that can’t leave the United States, citizen or permanent resident relatives that have severe psychological problems as a result of their spouse or parent leaving the country, and families that become destitute as a result of a husband or wife returning to and being stuck in their native country. The law does NOT require life-or-death situations in order to grant a waiver; simply hardship above and beyond a certain base level of hardship – a level established by precedent decisions and case law many years ago.
Well, leave it to USCIS to misinterpret and misapply the law, intentionally or not (and given how they usually work, my guess is the former). Waiver petitions in Ciudad Juarez are being routinely denied now, even when the hardship factors are extreme. One U.S. citizen spouse of a waiver applicant – that happened to work for the Federal government as well – was even told by a supervisor that Ciudad Juarez is now denying any case that does not have life-or-death issues. Many attorneys speculate that this situation is due to a new international waivers center opening this year in Anaheim, California, specifically intended to handle the tremendous number of waiver applications coming out of Ciudad Juarez. I should clarify that many waivers are not being denied outright, but being “referred for further processing due to lack of extreme hardship documentation” – another way of saying that these waiver applications are being forwarded to Anaheim for processing. Why do that, you might ask? The waiver section of the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez is swamped with literally thousands of these applications, and simply can’t handle them all (hence the opening of the Anaheim office). I know that it’s difficult to adjudicate hundreds or thousands of these applications a year, but come on people – you have to operate within the law and give everyone a fair chance. Telling meritorious applicants that they haven’t shown enough hardship and dumping the application on Anaheim isn’t fair to anyone concerned here – and needs to stop immediately.
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