The majority of family portraits taken of Claudia Figueiredo and Greg Cooper during their 2½-year marriage are screenshots of the couple chatting on Skype and are in a Facebook photo album called “E.T. Phone Home.”
“Like the alien,” Figueiredo said. “I’m an alien. That’s what I’m called.”
Since January 2013, Figueiredo, 43, has been living in her hometown of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where she is waiting to get her green card to return to Ventura County to be with her husband and find work in the U.S., where she received master’s and doctoral degrees.
“I’m actually having a really, really hard time,” she said. “It’s such a unique, temporary mindset that I have. ... I’m really frustrated. My entire life has been about waiting. I’m just waiting.”
The process for immigrants to get a visa through their citizen spouse or immediate relative started stalling after the Department of Homeland Security implemented a program in June 2012 to allow certain people to apply to avoid deportation if they came to the U.S. illegally before age 16.
Citizenship and Immigration Services spokeswoman Sharon Rummery said the agency “anticipated a temporary increase in processing times” for some applications “due to new filings from requests for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and the standard ebb and flow” of other immigration requests.
A citizen who files a petition for an immediate relative to immigrate to the United States faces a wait time of about eight months. A DHS representative said the agency hopes to reduce the processing time to five months by summer.
La Hermandad Mexicana, a California-based immigrants rights group, helped process about 100 petitions for immigration of an immediate relative from its Oxnard office in 2013, Executive Director Alicia Flores said. Approval took an average of eight months, she said.
Flores said applications for immigration of a family member, through the Form I-130, were typically approved within two or three months before the implementation of the childhood arrivals act, or DACA.
Citizenship and Immigration Services “mentioned that they’re going to try to process them faster, but that’s what happened after DACA,” Flores said. “The I-130 for immediate relatives — they’re the ones that were impacted.”
But Flores said she has noticed the processing time has dropped and that approval no longer takes “almost a year.”
“It’s improving,” she said. “Now that it’s going back to six months — they’re paying attention to the I-130s.”
Figueiredo’s immigration history began in 1997, when she came to the U.S. on a Fulbright scholarship. Her petition to immigrate was approved at the end of January, within six months of its filing and slightly longer than the five-month waiting period the DHS representative considers “acceptable.”
Now that her case has moved beyond Citizenship and Immigration Services to the National Visa Center, which is overseen by the State Department, the couple hope she will soon be assigned an interview at a U.S. consulate in Brazil and be able to return to Ventura County with a green card in the summer — about 1½ years after she left.
FINANCIAL BURDEN
Figueiredo’s struggle to find a job during her temporary stay in Brazil has forced the couple to rely on Cooper’s salary as a full-time instructor at the Brooks Institute in Ventura.
Hiring an immigration lawyer and paying application fees on one salary forced the pair back into their childhood homes, where they live with their mothers.
Cooper, 45, who lives in Ojai where he grew up, said he would have started the immigration process for his wife sooner but could not afford an attorney for the first six months she was in Brazil.
“The cost of my mortgage and cost of providing for Claudia in Brazil caused me to sell my condo (in Ventura),” he said. “I couldn’t sustain my mortgage and support her at the same time.”
The couple have spent $3,600 on legal fees and application costs. They expect to pay $600 to $1,000 more before she can return to the U.S.
“It has been the most difficult, emotional situation I’ve ever been in,” Cooper said. “It’s just a tremendous sense of loss that I feel. Obviously, I miss her. Obviously, I want our family together, but to try to cope with dealing with a relationship where my wife is 6,000 miles away — it’s an emotional drain. What’s worse is: I know my wife is feeling this 10 times, and it’s hard for me to try to provide for her when I feel totally useless.”
COPING
Sitting on the living room couch on a recent weekday afternoon, Cooper answered a Skype call from his wife on his iPad.
“Hi, sweetie,” Cooper said as her face appeared on the screen. “Come say hi to mommy,” he said, motioning toward the couple’s dog, Biskit, who walked over to Cooper and slouched beside him, occasionally licking the screen.
They first have a normal chat — family updates, Cooper’s workday, Biskit’s playing a little too rough with other dogs. Then the conversation moves in a direction unfamiliar to most.
What is the most recent update with Figueiredo’s case? What forms and reports does she need to ship to the visa center? Where does she need to go to get her passport photo taken and medical exam completed?
“It’s a very invasive process,” she said. “I understand them being very picky. It has to be. I don’t think it should be easy to get around it.”
Although Immigration and Customs Services has acknowledged the childhood arrivals program has diverted resources away from processing other visa applications, the couple agree the program is “fantastic.”
“If there is a complaint, that is not the complaint,” Figueiredo said. “It’s also about family.”
Before Figueiredo and Cooper end their Skype call, they exchange a couple of short phrases in Portuguese, saying, “I love you,” and “little kisses.”
Cooper has visited his wife three times in the past year, and while they have enjoyed exploring Brazil together, Figueiredo said she was more than ready to be back where she considers home — in Ventura County with her husband.
“I feel very disempowered,” she said. “It was not my choice to come here. I had to. I couldn’t find any other way to stay.”