Bringing back a deported family member

[Adriene H 89]

Hello, I posted the answer to your question above....I could copy and paste but I don't want to take up more room

Thank you and best of luck to you in all this!

[Phil314 0]

Go to www.immigrate2us.net

They have a forum like here except the members are very familiar with the ins and outs of I-212, I-601s and the ramifications of voluntary departure. Visa journey is a good site but not for cases like yours. Go to www.immigrate2us.net and join their forum and ask your question.

Congratulations on your engagement and I'm sorry your brother has been separated from his family.

Thank you! I will visit that forum.

[beejay 123]

Thank you! I will visit that forum.

Good luck and I hope you can get some answers for your situation.

[Boiler 45,578]

WARNING (LONG POST!)

It was voluntary deportation. Does that make a difference. Maybe I should have added a little more detail. Ok here it goes, let me know if it changes anything. He got married in 1997 to his girlfriend who was a US citizen and so he was issued a temporary visa at that time. But not long after they were married, they had marital problems. So much was going on with my family at that time...one of my younger brothers had enlisted in the army and was shipped overseas to Iraq, my youngest sister got diagnosed with a blood disorder, my father was sick, I was trying to graduate from college and ran out of money. I think all these things just added to their stress and so they divorced before his visa/paperwork could be finalized. So when his visa expired, he applied for cancellation of removal. On his scheduled court date, the Judge said he did not find that my brother had strong enough ties to the US (his lawyer at that time sucked). But the Judge was very kind and told my brother that because he is a person of good moral character, he told him he would just grant him voluntary departure and gave him a date to depart from the US (I think it was Oct. 28, 2005). So my brother bought his plane ticket to depart the day before his date of departure. I know he was cutting it close, but he really did not want to go back and so he stayed until the very last day he could. Needless to say....we got snow on the day he was supposed to fly out and so his flight was cancelled and he left the day after he was supposed to have left the United States. He did go to the embassy as soon as he got to Peru to have his paperwork stamped and show that he went back. Our lawyer advised us to filed the I-601 and the I-212 right away as well as the I-130. So we did. The I-130 was approved 2 years later. In 2009 we finally heard back about the I-601 and they were asking for more evidence. We got the notice 2 weeks before we could pull together money to hire a lawyer to help us with the evidence, so instead we withdrew our application and the lawyer we hired told us to focus on the I-212. So we did. In 2010 we heard back on our I-212 application and had a Notice of Intent to Deny. With the help of our new lawyer, she helped us gather the information they needed and we submitted the evidence by the due date in 2010. One year later...still no word on our application. In January 2012, our lawyer told me that she had heard from USCIS about the status of our application and that they were going to send another NOID. But instead of being sad about it, I prayed on it, and decided to write Secretary Napolitano about my brother's case. I got a reply from her office saying that she's sorry to hear about our situation, but because of the Privacy Act they could not help me and they would need to hear from my brother instead. So I had my brother write a letter from Peru and he also noted in that letter that he granted permission for me to have access to his information. I'm not saying my letter made a difference...but ironically, 2 months later after my brother sent his letter in, my lawyer got an email from USCIS that our application had been approved (she thought it was weird, but I didn't mention to her anything about a letter - she probably would have been upset we went behind her back). Anyway, I also got a follow-up call from a USCIS representative making sure that I had received the I-212 approval notice. A week after that, I got a letter addressed to me repeating what the USCIS officer had informed me and the letter also mentioned that the I-601 had also been approved (weird!). Anyway, it said that the NVC would notify the Consular in Peru and the Consular would then contact my brother for the next steps.

So that is where we are. My lawyer said that we just have to wait for his Priority Date to arrive, which is April 8, 2006. Sooo, I came to this board to see how long waiting for PD would take and if there was another way around that since I would like him here for my wedding. But now I'm hearing differently from you all.

That is back to front. You can not have an approved waiver without an otherwise approved petition. And that can not happen until his priority date is current and he has been refused a visa at his consulate interview.

If his PD is before 2015 then he will need a waiver to come back before then. Rather tricky, you need extreme hardships to the USC's.

I have no idea what you Lawyers have been doing.