A San Diego man is urging people to help him get his wife released from the Otay Mesa Detention Center.
THIS IS BAD. LIKE THE END OF SAFETY FOR ANY NON-NATURALIZED IMMIGRANT IN THE US. NO I AM NOT EXAGGERATING.
If this story is accurate as written, this is the single thing I've been most afraid of since they started grabbing people, as a greencard holder. Why? Let me explain. The US immigration system is broken. I'm sure everyone here can agree with that, but it's broken in some very, very specific ways. The wait times for different processes can say 'it should be a couple of weeks' but what they don't tell you is that it's a couple of weeks once you get moved from USCIS processing to NVC (national visa centre) processing. USCIS processing is a very long queue, effectively. Your application sits in it for weeks, months, or years without being touched. That means that there's no quick and effective way to get a renewal. If you've done everything right and your visa or other immigrant benefit is coming near its expiry date, then you need to renew. The window for renewal is 90 days for most immigrant benefits and visas so if your visa is 91 days away from expiring and you send in your application, they'll send it back and tell you to wait. The wait time at USCIS drastically exceeds those 90 days, so when you send in your application for extension, you get a little receipt you need to carry around with your visa or greencard that says 'the person named here has a one year extension on their benefits while we process their extension application.' Sometimes processing at USCIS takes so long you actually have to call and get multiple receipts before you get a new visa/immigrant benefit. Because sometimes processing is so backlogged it takes literally multiple years. The way this has always worked is that if you have a receipt that shows you Did Your Part, you're considered in-status even though bureaucracy means that it takes longer to renew your status than it should and the dates on your visa/greencard/other immigrant benefit say it's expired. What they're saying about this woman is that she renewed and had not received the renewal yet and they're counting that as having been out of status. That literally affects every single non-citizen immigrant in the US. If this is how they're playing, there is no longer any way to actually 'do things the right way' because they've taken away the ability to do so. We're fucked. This is what I've been terrified of because there's no longer any way to stay in-status when you need to renew. Your expiration date is the last day you're safe and they'll use their own bureaucracy to detain you.
