Immigration Corner | Will I ever get back my visa?

Dear Mrs Walker-Huntington,

In 2019 I travelled to the USA and my visitor’s visa got cancelled. After I landed and was given six months stay, upon reaching customs to retrieve my luggage I was pulled aside by two ICE officers who interrogated me for about three hours.

I confessed to them that when I was there for three months in 2016, I worked for a week. That’s the reason for the cancellation of my visa. They told me that I could reapply for a visa in five years – which was 2024. So my question: what is the likelihood of me being issued another visitor’s visa if I reapply?

JS

Dear JS,

A visitor to the United States is not permitted to work – not for an hour, a day, a week, a month or longer. It is not a harmless undertaking, and it violates the terms of your non-immigrant visa. The grant of any non-immigrant visa is a privilege and not a right. It is a privilege extended based on the factors presented to the consular officer at the time of the visa application and the consular officer’s decision in your case to accept that you would visit the United States and return to your home country.

So much goes into the decision-making process by the consular officer – including your employment in your home country. When you come to America for three months, the question becomes – what of your job or business in your home country?

When someone spends an extended period in America as a visitor, it raises the red flag that the person is working in the United States. Yes, there are persons who vacation in America for extended periods and some even own homes in the US – but those persons can demonstrate their financial ability to be present in America without working during the relevant periods.

The fact that you were told to wait five years to reapply for your visa, eliminates the need to apply for a special waiver of the five-year bar to apply. It does not mean that the reason your visa was revoked in the first place goes away. In fact, it now makes even less likely that you would be granted another non-immigrant US visa because you abused the privilege of the previously cancelled visa.

Dahlia A. Walker-Huntington, Esq. is a Jamaican-American attorney who practises immigration law in the United States; and family, criminal and international law in Florida. She is a mediator and former special magistrate and hearing officer in Broward County, Florida. info@walkerhuntington.com