Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of occasional stories about a Ventura County couple going through the immigration process.
After spending more than $4,000 in the past 18 months to try to adjust her immigration status, Blanca Terre, 23, has not received a green card through her husband, a U.S. citizen.
Terre, who has lived in California since she illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border at age 11, hit a wall in the immigration process in October when her application seeking reprieve for the time she spent in the country illegally was denied.
The State Department is still considering Terre’s request to become a legal permanent resident, but she needs an unlawful-presence waiver from Citizenship and Immigration Services. Without it, she could face a 10-year ban on immigrating to the U.S. if she went outside the country for her visa interview.
Left with the option to spend an additional $585 to reapply for the waiver and risk being denied again, Terre said she made an easy decision to go another route, at least for now.
“I feel so bad,” she said. “I wanted to cry because, man, that was so much money. ... Oh, well, things happen for a reason.”
Terre recently received work authorization and temporary protection from deportation after being approved through the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. For the first time, she is driving with a license and has a Social Security number.
The couple spent $780 more in federal application fees and help from a local immigration assistance nonprofit before securing deferred action for Terre.
She might lack a pathway to citizenship, but Terre said that no longer living in fear of separation from her husband of nearly two years was “a good feeling.”
“That was the worst year of my life,” she said. “It was affecting us, but now I feel relief and stress free.”
TEMPORARY RELIEF
Terre has been a taxpaying dental assistant since she graduated high school in Oxnard, but having legal work authorization has given her the confidence to start looking for a new job.
“I was kind of scared to look for another job,” said Terre, who hopes to become a dental hygienist.
Terre started working in March for a dental office in Simi Valley, closer to the Moorpark apartment where the couple have been living since May. Marc, 22, is studying to become a radiology technologist at Moorpark College.
“At this point in our lives right now, it’s just all going forward,” Marc Terre said. “It’s just filling in our path.”
The couple’s middle names were used in past stories to protect Terre’s identity until she was granted an immigration status that did not put her in jeopardy of deportation.
The young pair regret not securing a temporary status for Terre in the first place.
“Most of the people that we talked to — they told us the way we should have done it was through DACA first and then through marriage, and we did it the other way around,” Terre said.
Through the program, Terre has an immigration status based solely on her actions, not the fact she is married to a U.S. citizen.
“I still got it, and that has nothing to do with him. That has to do with me because I finished high school,” she said. “Because I have proof of all that, I still got something.”
But Terre said she will not settle for temporary relief from the childhood arrival program.
The program “is not a for sure thing. ... They might take it away,” she said. “I have to renew it every two years. What if the next two years they don’t give you a permit? Then what are you going to do?”
Terre said she still feels like she’s “just waiting” to become a legal permanent resident through her husband’s citizenship.
Because of evolving case law, she might be able to achieve that without an unlawful-presence waiver.
ADVANCE PAROLE
The pair recently met with immigration attorneys about their case at the Conejo Free Clinic in Thousand Oaks, which offers free immigration counseling the fourth Tuesday of each month.
“They’re as American as they come,” said Allan Mackins, a partner at Sherman Oaks-based immigration law firm Mackins & Mackins LLP, which serves Ventura County. “It continues to highlight the broken immigration system.”
Firm partners Allan and Mackenzie Mackins said Terre might be able to seek legal permanent residency without the unlawful-presence waiver.
Citizenship and Immigration Services may grant “advance parole” to qualified individuals with a pending application to adjust legal status to allow them to travel abroad and come back into the U.S., even if they do not have a green card.
Recipients of temporary protection through the childhood arrival program, regardless of whether they are seeking legal permanent residency, may apply for advance parole to travel outside the U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services will generally grant recipients advance parole for educational, employment and humanitarian reasons, including a family death or visit to a sick relative, spokeswoman Claire Nicholson said in an email.
The agency “will determine whether the purpose for international travel is justifiable,” Nicholson said. “All advance parole requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis.”
But the Department of Homeland Security may revoke advance parole at any time, including while the recipient of the travel document is outside the country.
“Advance parole has always been risky,” Mackenzie Mackins said.
People have left the U.S. with the temporary travel document but have had issues coming back, Mackins said. Being outside the country would then trigger a three- or 10-year ban on immigrating to the U.S. because of the time spent there illegally.
“People who are leaving on advance parole with permission from the government should not be subject to this bar,” Mackins said. “The government lets them leave, and then they get punished. It doesn’t seem fair.”
That was the reasoning of a 2012 Justice Department case in which the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled, “An alien who leaves the United States temporarily pursuant to a grant of advance parole does not thereby make a ‘departure’” and should be paroled back into the U.S.
Mackins said this “developing case law” has led to reports from Los Angeles-area attorneys who have helped get green cards for those who re-entered the U.S. after leaving on advance parole without the unlawful-presence waiver.
“That’s our job: to try to find a way to get people a legal status,” Allan Mackins said. “It’s a loophole in a broken, broken, broken system. It’s so messed up that they allow people to have this DACA status and go and visit their sick grandmothers, and now they have legal entry in the eyes of the law.”
If Terre can go on advance parole to Mexico for the first time since leaving as a child, she hopes to bring her husband so they can meet her nieces and nephews for the first time.
“My brothers are having babies — my sister, too,” she said. “I haven’t met none of them, just pictures. The family is growing up so much.”