A Houston woman is unable to return home to her husband and son, after alleged discrepancies in her green card application led the United States banning her from entering the country for 10 years.
Claudia González first immigrated from Mexico to the US as a teenager - when her mother told her to get into a vehicle driven by a human smuggler, who brought her to Texas in 2003. In the two decades that followed, Claudia attended high school, married an American citizen and had a son in 2009, the Texas Tribune reported.
In 2018, Claudia received a work permit and a Social Security number, after she successfully applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA.) She found a job she loved at a local elementary school, where she handled data entry and acted as a translator for parents who didn't speak English.
"I always wanted to make a difference and help people that don't speak English," she told the Texas Tribune. "My English is not perfect, you know, but I always tried to help them."
Claudia renewed her work visa on four occasions, paying nearly $2000 in fees. In an effort to make her status in the US permanent, her husband sponsored her 2019 green card application. While the family was trying to become permanently secure in the US, however, tragedy struck their loved ones in Mexico.
Claudia's brother, Jose Fabian, vanished from his ranch in Mexico - prompting fears that he'd been kidnapped by the cartel. After his disappearance, Claudia wanted to return to Mexico to be with her mother but her shakey immigration status and Covid-related bureaucratic delays meant that she waited years to travel.
Last year, she finally received an immigration appointment in Juárez, where she was twice interviewed by an immigration official. Claudia's son, an American citizen, traveled with her and the pair visited with her mother and sister. Though Claudia said she followed her lawyer's instructions - answering honestly about how she illegally entered the US as a teen - she soon received an email denying her visa request and banning her from the country.
"It was really hard to receive that message; I was heartbroken," she told the Texas Tribune. "I thought about my son. He just started high school, so my thought was that he'll be 24 by the time I can return and he probably already will have graduated college."
Though Claudia does not know the exact reason why her situation escalated, she believes it is partially because her lawyer incorrectly filled out her immigration paperwork - writing that she entered the country alone, when she actually entered with two strangers. Then he stopped working with her.
"He told me that this was out of his expertise and he couldn't help me and wished me well," she told the Texas Tribune.
Adding to Claudia's anguish, her new attorney notes that she didn't need to go through the green card process to see her family in Mexico - as a DACA recipient she was eligible to apply for short-term permission to travel there.
"I feel so ignorant now," Claudia told the Texas Tribune, noting that her old lawyer advised against this method. "I should have done more research."
Claudia remains hopeful that she will be able to return to her family - but in the meantime, her loved ones have to face an indefinite waiting period before she is back in Houston.
"I was just having a hard time accepting that she's not with me," her son told the Texas Tribune. "I was in my head like: 'Why? Why is the government like this? Why can't it be simpler than it is now?'"
