Tag: visa

News

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

LS

Many of you have asked and we are sure others are wondering – what is happening with our never ending citizenship drama?

Well…the short version is…

Unfortunately the emails sent to the State Department (OCI) have not gotten us anywhere. Lifeline graciously sent this out using the terminology drafted by our adoption/immigration lawyer. However, other than a quick response email to let us know they had internally transferred it to the proper overseeing department, we have not heard anything. This upcoming Tuesday will mark 4 weeks with no response on something that was supposed to be relatively routine, simple, and understandable (moving our immigration visa – DS260 – from the U.S. Consulate in Brazil to the U.S. Consulate in Germany).

With the time passing and our window for remaining in Germany rapidly closing, we have found ourselves between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand we cannot legally work in Germany beyond July 13th. We could buy a little additional time if we can demonstrate we are on vacation for the purpose of packing and moving, however, extending that too long runs the risk of us being denied social security for violating our 5 year window to work in Germany. Furthermore, our housing contract expires August 2nd and Luke and Elijah’s residence permits expire at the end of July. All this means that we need to leave the country shortly after July 13th and before the end of the month. Unfortunately, due to the chaotic citizenship process, we cannot get the kids into the USA without completing one of the two open routes.

Where does that leave us?

Well, in consultation with our lawyer, our adoption agency, and our missions agency, we have two options available:

  1. We can attempt to return to Rio de Janeiro where the U.S. Consulate is in order to try to complete the DS260 (immigration visa that was never closed). Our lawyer suggested this would be, on paper, the most advisable route as it would allow us to return to the U.S. immediately upon completion. HOWEVER – as with just about everything in our lives at this moment, nothing is quite as simple as it seems. The foreseeable issues with this route are that the DS260 is designed for people who intend to reside permanently in the U.S. (i.e. they are immigrating there). We are very much on the borderline of meeting this as our long term goals are to transition to Austria, not remain in the U.S. Normally, this would require us staying more than a “short time” to avoid risking having citizenship certificates cancelled. Historically this time frame has been understood to be 6 months, although it still astounds us that children of two U.S. citizen parents could have their citizenship revoked for not remaining in country longer than 6 months. However, lately the issue has been that, like all the other processes, the DS260 is taking much longer to process than it used to. In fact, a family in Brazil at the same time we were, only just recently received their DS260…more than 7 months after application. This means that citizenship was not granted until then, passports could not be applied for until after this point in time, and we would be looking at 8-9 months from start to ability to return overseas…and that is if everything went on the same timeline as a family who followed the “normal” process. The trouble is, that nothing about our situation has been following “normal”. This could put our timeline for Austria in jeopardy. And the trouble with this is that it was constructed to bear in mind the residence permit process and to time school schedules…which could mean kids trying to jump into new schools, in new languages, in a new environment partway through a school semester. In addition, there is the concern that the consulate in Rio de Janeiro was already contacted twice regarding the DS260s…initially to ask them to close these (when we learned they had never been closed) and then, more recently, to ask them to transfer these to Germany. Both requests were met with a response of the consulate not being willing to take any action without directives from higher up groups (hence us attempting to contact OCI to get this directive). In consultation with our adoption agency, they advised against going this route. The reason being that while we were in Brazil, the consulate, who had never had an expatriate family, did not properly issue a critical document (Article 5) despite everything being submitted properly. It took them 2-3 weeks after we had already received custody of the kids for this to be done (despite this supposed to be finished before we arrived in country). Lifeline (our agency) also informed us that this involved a good bit of correspondence with OCI, which was a reason it was so delayed. Their concern is that based on this they would likely not issue us the DS260s, would consult OCI again (which would lead to significant delays), and may very well require us to do additional steps with a very different timeline (because the other timeline is designed and strictly regulated for adoptive families in country and in process). This is a rock for sure.
  2. We can leave Germany and temporarily settle in another country while we wait for the N600-K process to be completed (the citizenship route for families living outside of the U.S. which involves a non-immigration visa). In consultation with MTW (our mission’s board), we do actually have an option that would provide us 6 months of time, with the ability to homeschool (to help complete getting our kids caught up to the proper grades), and the opportunity to pulpit supply for a church currently without a pastor. HOWEVER – just as with the first option, nothing is quite as simple as it seems. Completing the N600-K process means our kids will be issued a non-immigration visa requiring their stay in country post citizenship to be less than a “short time” (i.e. 6 months) or we risk having our kids lose their certificate of citizenship after issuance and having passports revoked. We fail to fathom why two American citizens could have this occur for their adoptive children, but the current political climate means this is not simply an empty threat, but a real concern. That would require us to shorten our time frame in the U.S., reducing the amount of time we would have to raise support, experience our home furlough, and spend time with family. Furthermore, the N600-K process has been ongoing since October with no known end in sight despite repeated inquiries. An additional complication is that recently checking on the USCIS average wait times for the N600-K process in St. Louis (where our application was filed) showed that their timeline has changed. We had been warned by Lifeline that all the signs were indicating that USCIS is really far behind and even updating wait times online is behind. When we first filed the average wait time was 8.5 months which is about where we are right now. Legally we are not allowed to file a complaint, request information, or require USCIS to either expediate our case or inform of how much longer it will take until we have exceeded the average wait time. When we checked just a few days ago, the update was 65 months. Although we anticipated an increase, an 8-fold increase was completely shocking to us and absolutely unthinkable…why does an adoption citizenship process take more than 5 years to process??? Our lawyer did say that if we went this route, she would help us move our application to another USCIS center and push for faster processing. However, this would mean essentially restarting this application at a new site. It would run the risk that 6 months out of Germany might not be long enough. If that was the case, we might need to simply move to Austria earlier than originally planned, only go to the U.S. for the citizenship hearing, and then plan a home furlough for later when the timeline works better for us. Thankfully our support is strong enough to allow for this, but we do need to raise more at some stage especially since we are still operating on the same budget from when we had one child. This is our hard place.

As hard as it is to believe, this really was the short version. And our timeframe is rapidly disintegrating. Early this week we need to make a decision to either begin moving to set up option 1 or option 2. As you might be able to tell, we would greatly welcome and very much need prayers for wisdom. We are thankful that though we feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, God is in perfect control and He is not trapped in the slightest. We look forward to seeing how He works this all out, what He will teach us through this, and how His hand will move. We are learning so much more about trust and reliance on His sovereignty than we ever thought.

And thank you for asking, for your concern. It means so much to us! Your support and prayers have been an enormous blessing and the Lord is sustaining us through them. We are thankful to know the One who is writing our story and we are thankful that He is writing you into it too!

News

Putting out Fires

LS

Walking through any trial in life can feel like chaos completely out of control. Adoption often feels like this as every day seemingly brings new adjustments, changes, emotional challenges, etc. Ours has certainly felt like this and more so lately. One image that comes to mind is putting out fires. It feels like everything is burning at a horribly rapid rate and part of what we are trying to do is determine which fire is the most urgent. One fire is about all we can manage at a time, and trying to extinguish the most threatening and then quickly moving on to the next is exhausting.

What is even more annoying is that new fires seem to spring up spontaneously and threaten to blow into an uncontrollable blaze. The latest difficulties with citizenship and visas are one example. We thought, back in October, that we would have the citizenship appointment somewhat close to our requested time of February. We never thought we would be coming down to the wire of needing to exit Germany with no end in sight toward the citizenship process.

One of the spontaneous fires that comes along with this is the need to renew our children’s passports. They were all issued emergency passports just before we left Brazil, which only carry one year’s worth of validity. Because the process is dragging on, we realized we would have to renew these as we have less than 6 months left on them and many countries won’t issues visas without more than 6 months left. Thankfully, we got some amazing help from a Brazilian friend who gave step by step directions. Even so, with 4, it took more than 4 hours to complete the application process…and it would have easily taken 3 to 4 times as long without the amazing assist.

Another spontaneous fire that popped up was that one our children had their tax identification number cancelled for no reason. Three of them were no issue, but one was. Unfortunately, Brazilian passports require an active tax id. This had us scrambling to try to get it reinstated. Once again, our friend proved very helpful in researching how to fix this. We tried one thing, to request a reinstatement of the number. We then went to the Brazilian consulate to drop off original documents, and were told we would also need to change the names of all the kids from their birth names (which were linked to the tax id) to their new names. This had us rush home to send a flurry of emails out requesting this…only to receive a note from the tax office informing us that due to adoption, we needed to file for entirely new tax ids. Another fire that started. Thankfully, the tax office responded to this new request very quickly and in a few days we had the new tax ids which we sent to the consulate.

Thankfully this was a spontaneous fire that we managed to extinguish relatively fast. But, extinguishing fires takes tremendous amounts of energy and, in this case, time. It left us more emotionally drained and exhausted. We are thankful for all the help we received. Fighting fires in with other firefighters is an enormous blessing.

We are still in the midst of a burning building. The processing time for the passports is around 6 weeks, which will put us very close to our deadline. We still have no information from the US side regarding either transferring the open immigration visa or the N600-K citizenship application process. We are now down to a month and a half from when our certificate of coverage allowing us to work in Germany expires. There are no concrete plans in place, because none can be made. We are exploring alternative options, starting to see about back up plans, pushing for information, and praying for wisdom. The Lord has His timing, but it certainly can seem like the winds are blowing the first in the wrong direction.

Thank you so much for your prayers, concern, and encouragement! Having other firefighters surrounding us is incredibly important and essential. The Lord is graciously sustaining us through you!