Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient Marco Villada Garibay was doing everything right. With his protections expiring in 2019, Villada Garibay began the process of adjusting his status through his husband, Israel Serrato. “Under U.S. law,” the Washington Post reports, “citizens such as Serrato can sponsor spouses for green cards,” “a process that requires the immigrant spouse to return to his or her birth country to apply through a U.S. Consulate there.” Villada Garibay applied for and received a provisional waiver that would allow him to go to Mexico, with the assurance that he could come back. But, once in Mexico, everything went horribly wrong:
The consular official interviewing Villada kept leaving the room and returning. At the end, she gave him a blue paper saying his application for a visa was denied — and that he could not return to the United States for at least a decade, if at all.
Villada and Serrato had planned a dinner celebration that night. Instead, they went to their hotel and held each other, sobbing, for hours. A few days later, Serrato returned to L.A., alone.
According to the Washington Post, “one of their (new) lawyers, Stacy Tolchin, said she has gotten a lot of calls lately like this one: from immigrants who left the country after receiving provisional waivers, only to be told at their consular interview that—oops!—the government found something disqualifying them from returning to the United States after all.” In Villada Garibay’s case, he’s staying with distant relatives, while Serrat, “without a second income and crushed by the weight of their prior legal bills,” has been “forced to sell their furniture and move in with a friend.” This is outrageous, and the National Immigration Law Center plans to sue to reunite them in the U.S.:
In Villada’s case, the consulate told him, he’d been disqualified by a short trip he took in 2000, at 17, to Mexico to attend his grandfather’s funeral. The consulate said the problem was that he entered the country “without inspection” a second time. But Villada had already disclosed this trip to the government when he applied for that provisional waiver. Plus his lawyers argue that because an immigration official had looked at his school I.D. and waved him through, he didn’t enter the country illegally according to recent case law.
Tolchin: “I don’t know if they were lazy and sloppy or looking for ways to trap people. Either way, they have an obligation to do their job, and they didn’t do it.” The latter theory is perfectly plausible—there have been several instances of immigrants in the U.S. who attempted to adjust their legal status, only to get arrested and detained at their appointments. In February, ICE arrested another LGBTQ man, Jose “Ivan” Nuñez, who was attempting to gain legal status through his U.S. citizen husband, Paul Frame. “We are all victims of this unjust decision,” Serrato said about Villada Garibay. “He belongs here. He belongs here with me.” Click here to sign a petition in his support.