Mixed-status families navigate a legal web and fear separation

RIGBY — Juan Alvarez never wanted to live in the United States.

Alvarez is from Zacatecas, Mexico, and saw his mother struggle to stay afloat as his sister dealt with severe epilepsy. He wanted to find work to support her, so he moved to the United States illegally in 1996 and has been sending money to his mother ever since.

In 2004, he married Raquel Reyes, a U.S. citizen. Now, the couple lives in the Treasure Valley. Due to fear of being stuck outside the U.S., he has never returned to Mexico to visit his mother or sisters. EastIdahoNews.com spoke to Reyes, and she says immigrants like Alvarez don’t always want citizenship — they just want legal status.

“They just would like to have legal status to return home, go see their families and come back,” Reyes said. “This is their home now. They love their country, yes, but that’s no longer their home. They haven’t been there for years. For us, and for him, he just wants his legal status.”

Reyes says when they got married, they could have paid a $1,000 fine to obtain legal status. They decided not to because Alvarez worried people would think they only got married for legal status.

“We were never really worried about it until the election of 2016,” Reyes said. “When Donald Trump was elected, it brought me fear.”

Robin Navarro is from Guatemala and has lived undocumented in the U.S. for 10 years. His wife, Jennifer Navarro, was born in Salt Lake City but grew up in Guatemala and returned to the United States as an adult. Now, they live in Rigby.

In 2020, they submitted the I-601-A, the application for provisional unlawful presence waiver. This would provide forgiveness for coming to the United States. To complete this step, he would need to go to Guatemala for an interview with the U.S. consulate to obtain a green card. But before he could go to Guatemala, the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

“Everything kind of stopped,” Jennifer said. “Anyone in my situation, all the processes stopped for all those families.”

When they applied, the processing time was two years. Then, the process extended to four years. Since they had to deal with the pandemic on top of the four-year delay, the Navarros have a six-year wait.

The uncertainty is frightening for the Navarros, because if Robin is sent back to Guatemala, Jennifer would have to support eight children on her own.

Jennifer adds that many people come to the U.S. to find safety and escape poverty.

“A lot of people come here because they’re in poverty,” Jennifer said. “They can’t progress in their country. They’re threatened by gang members. The political situation in their country is awful. They look at the U.S., and they see people progressing here. They see people having an opportunity to get better, and so they sacrifice everything to come here.”

Nancy Vera lives in Rexburg and is in the U.S. under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Her parents brought her to the U.S. from Mexico when she was under 3 years old. She has been married for three years to a U.S. citizen, and they have two children together. Vera has never been back to Mexico.

“If I were to be sent back to my country, it would be so foreign to me,” Vera said.

DACA allows children who were brought to the U.S. to continue living in the country, despite not technically having legal status. There is no path to citizenship for those same people under DACA.

DACA rolled out during the Obama administration in 2012 when Vera was 16 years old. That’s when she realized that without DACA, she would not be able to have a driver’s license or get a job.

Vera is working toward obtaining permanent residence and says her biggest challenges are the costs, proving her marriage is legitimate and proving she hasn’t left the U.S.

“I think the process needs to be made a lot more easier, especially for families. I know there are circumstances where people try to take advantage and try to just get married to a citizen because they want the papers, but it just makes it … harder for the people that are actually legit applying for the program because they have good reasons,” Vera said.

Her lawyers said it will take three to nine months after submitting for a green card to hear back about next steps.

The law

Reyes and Alvarez filed the I-130 Petition for Alien Relative in 2017. This is the first step to help a relative apply for a green card. Before continuing the process, an immigration attorney told her to wait to file for the I-601-A, the application for provisional unlawful presence waiver.

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services closed their case. They tried to appeal three times, but USCIS never reopened the case. Last year, Reyes and Alvarez restarted the process.

Reyes says they have spent $4,000 so far.

Meridian immigration attorney Nicole Derden told EastIdahoNews.com that the most common issue her clients have is unlawful presence in the U.S. Once a person has accumulated more than six months of unlawful presence, they are subject to a three-year ban from receiving a visa or green card. They must leave the country for three years before applying for a visa.

When people accumulate a year of unlawful presence in the U.S., they are subject to a 10-year ban from the country. This sometimes involves a decade-long family separation.

“Some people can thrive in that environment, and it makes their relationship stronger, but in other cases, it really is detrimental and the children suffer in school. People’s mental health deteriorates,” Derden said.

The I-601-A applies to those who have more than six months of unlawful presence and are required to leave the U.S. to process their green card because they entered the U.S. completely undetected. This waives the three- to 10-year bans.

With the I-601-A, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigrations officer reviews the case to determine if someone has sufficient hardship to waive the unlawful presence. If they are approved, then the undocumented individual presents their case abroad to a U.S. consulate officer, who reviews other issues of inadmissibility such as committing a disqualifying crime.

Before the I-601-A was introduced, a person would have to wait for the consulate officer’s review before submitting a waiver of inadmissibility. The I-601-A allows the issue of unlawful presence to be reviewed before the consulate appointment, streamlining the process.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, government offices shut down, which means I-601-A applications were not reviewed until late 2022. Today, government offices are still working on the backlog.

“I typically tell people that you’re looking at a five- to six-year time period to get your green card issued from your home consulate,” Derden said.

Part of the process of adjusting one’s legal status includes proving a person was admitted or paroled into the U.S.

In June 2024, the Biden administration introduced Keeping Families Together, a process for noncitizen spouses and stepchildren of U.S. citizens to apply for parole in place. With this program, noncitizen spouses who have maintained continuous presence in the U.S. for at least 10 years would be able to apply for permanent residence without needing to return to their home country.

In response to the program, Texas and 15 other states filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The lawsuit claimed the state has paid tens of millions of dollars annually from health care to law enforcement because of immigrants living in the state without legal status.

“(Keeping Families Together) says you had to have been here at least 10 years illegally, which is terrible policy,” said Lora Ries, the director of border security and immigration center at the Heritage Foundation. “You’re rewarding not just illegal activity, but prolonged illegal activity.”

The states involved in the lawsuit claimed Keeping Families Together would cause irreparable harm and accused the administration of bypassing Congress for “blatant political purposes,” according to The Associated Press.

The Navarros have paid almost $30,000 throughout the process for Robin’s documents, passport and travel. When Keeping Families Together rolled out, they were excited to apply.

“Parole in place gave us all some hope that maybe we won’t have to spend another $20,000 to go to Guatemala, because we’d have to go and spend maybe two weeks there,” Jennifer said. “It was just disappointing.”

According to ABC News, Judge J. Campbell Barker ruled on Nov. 7 to dismantle the program, stating that the Biden administration had exceeded its statutory authority because the Immigration and Nationality Act allows for paroling people “into the United States,” not to those already in the country.

DACA is a legacy program for people brought to the U.S. as children. DACA acknowledges that they are in the U.S. illegally, but they have deferred action on deportation. Although it is not an active program, the government accepts renewals. Now, children who are brought to the U.S. illegally remain undocumented unless they receive legal status through other means.

Immigration law moving forward

EastIdahoNews.com submitted questions to U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, about 10-year bans from the U.S., Keeping Families Together, costs and processing times. Crapo sent the following response:

“Our immigration system must not grant amnesty to those who enter our country illegally. No person who breaks the law and enters the U.S. illegally should obtain any benefit toward either permanent legal residency or citizenship as a result of their illegal conduct. This is unfair both to American citizens and to those who have gone through legal channels for immigration to the U.S. Further, U.S. taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for those wishing to immigrate to the country.”

Heritage Foundation representative Ries echoes Crapo’s stance.

“What’s lost in all this is personal responsibility,” said Ries. “The people who came here illegally or came on a visa and overstayed and never left, they are responsible for putting themselves in this situation and violating the law. People now just expect that after so many years because they then had children and married a U.S. citizen, that their violations of the law should just be wiped away.”

Jennifer understands that the U.S. needs to keep criminals out of the country but thinks the process should be easier if an immigrant is married to a U.S. citizen.

“When they say their comments, it’s like they’re saying, ‘We hate everybody who is illegal, and we want them out of our country,’ and they don’t realize that what they’re saying is, ‘We want to destroy your family,’” Jennifer said.

Ries and Derden agree that Congress — not a presidential administration — needs to reform immigration laws.

“Pre-Biden, our immigration system was dysfunctional. Too slow. Too confusing. Too complicated. Too expensive,” Ries said. “Now, due to this administration’s erasing the law or the line between legal and illegal immigration, you can’t even recognize it anymore because we are not upholding the law. So it needs to be made more simple.”

“Each political party, when they come into the presidential office, they make grandiose claims and they take really large executive orders and actions, but really, we need acts of Congress,” Derden said. “We need our congressional representatives to come to the center of the aisle and talk about what is happening in our communities and how our immigration laws need to be updated.”