Julieta Quiñonez’s voice still cracks when she talks about the fear she felt crossing the border from the United States into Mexico last fall.
The 2008 graduate of the University of Denver had been born in Mexico but brought illegally to the United States by her parents when she was a toddler. When she crossed back to Mexico, leaving behind her U.S.-citizen husband and 2-year-old son, that action ironically was her only shot at becoming a legal resident of the United States.
She is still waiting in Mexico for an end to the cumbersome and lengthy process of getting a green card to return.
Friday, the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services announced a proposed tweaking of a rule that will help Quiñonez and thousands more like her who face months and years separated from family members while they try to go through the proper channels to get legal residency.
The new rule would amend a bureaucratic glitch that currently requires the immigrant spouses or other close family members of U.S. citizens to return to their own countries to apply for the green cards that they usually are entitled to by law.
The catch is that, once they leave, they can be barred from returning to the U.S. for three to 10 years, depending on how long they have lived illegally in the United States.
Even if they apply for a waiver, citing extreme hardship to a U.S. citizen because of the separation, the process can drag on for many months or years.
The proposed new rule would still require immigrants to go back to their countries to pick up their visas. But they could obtain a provisional waiver in the United States before making that journey. That would lessen the fear they might not be allowed to return and would cut down the waiting time for visas to weeks.
“It’s a very big deal. Ninety percent of the people who come to our office have to leave the country to get legal status. They wait weeks and then they wait additional months. Most clients say they can’t be away from their families that long,” said Denver immigration attorney Jeff Joseph. “It’s a disincentive to get legal status.”
Joseph and other immigration attorneys say many undocumented immigrants remain here illegally, not just because of the separation and the possibility they may not be allowed back for years. They also fear violence in other countries.
For Quiñonez, that was the lesser of two fears when she decided to attempt to do things the right way.
“I couldn’t put my degree to use, and the laws were getting so tough. Even driving to the grocery store was getting scary. I couldn’t stand it anymore,” said Quiñonez, 25.
Hans Meyer, a Denver immigration attorney and Colorado Immigration Rights Coalition staff member, said he expects the rule change, if it is approved after a public comment period, will lower the numbers of illegal immigrants in the country.
“All the people who would benefit from this are people who are trying to do things legally under the law,” Meyers said. “This is probably one of the most reasonable tweaks that could happen in immigration law.”
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit that advocates for a decrease in immigration, views the proposed change as a political “end run around Congress.”
“It’s an election-year ploy to get liberal supporters and Hispanic activists excited about the president’s re-election attempt,” he said.
Given the quirks and backlogs in the current system, Quiñonez could benefit from the rule change because there is a chance she could still be waiting in Mexico when the new rule is expected to go into effect in a year.
Her son and her U.S.-born husband have joined her there after her husband lost his job in Denver because of the time off he needed to deal with the separation. Their lives are on hold.
She said she checks the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services’ website daily to see if her name is on the list of approved waivers.
“I just hope every day,” she said.
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com
