Johnny Can’t Travel With Us: A Lament Over U.S. Immigration

All year, we’ve been planning a family trip back to Tanzania in June–the precise window of time when our kids’ new school would be finished and Haven of Peace Academy would still be in session. We had such a traumatic ending last March. All year, our family has talked about going back and finishing better. 

But U.S. immigration won’t let us leave the country with Johnny. So that means Grace, Lily, and I will still go to Tanzania this June–only half of us. I’m excited to go, but this is not what I wanted. So I lament.

Yet this isn’t my first struggle with U.S. immigration. It’s been going on for fifteen years.

I think part of the reason why I have compassion for immigrants is because I have four of them in my family. Maybe this is news to some, but children adopted internationally by Americans don’t automatically become U.S. citizens. In the fifteen years I’ve had my children, I’ve often been prevented from bringing them into the United States. And now I’m being prevented from taking one out. 

This has been a theme of our lives. Here’s one example (of many that could be told):

I still remember the day so clearly: Josiah was two years old. By this time, he had been in our home since he was nine months old and had just been officially adopted. In order to start his U.S. citizenship process, he had to be in our custody for two years. Since we hadn’t met that mark yet, if we wanted to visit the States, we needed to get him a tourist visa. 

Already, we had delayed our home assignment twice that year because Josiah’s adoption took months longer than we anticipated. So we had high hopes for this tourist visa, and we didn’t have any reason to believe it would be denied. In fact, we had purchased plane tickets to leave just ten days after this visa appointment.

Josiah and I made the trip to the embassy for our 8:00 am appointment. The U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam is like stepping into a different world; you leave the noise and dust of the Dar streets and into a fortress with perfectly manicured grass, immaculate grounds, and toilets that flush themselves. Oh, and a drinking fountain, which was an indescribable wonder to my children.

You might remember that the previous embassy in Tanzania had been bombed by Al-qaeda in 1998. So entering this embassy was like airport security on steroids. You could take in nothing with you other than your documents and your car keys. No phone, no purse, no toys to occupy the two-year-old. Not even a folder to put your documents in; you had to carry your stack of irreplaceable documents in a pile and hope none of them got lost while wrangling your toddler. It didn’t matter that I was American; I was treated like any other Tanzanian hoping for a tourist visa.

My two-year-old and I waited for two hours that morning. The waiting room was crowded; we could hear the interviews happening behind the bullet-proof glass at the front of the room. I tried my best to keep Josiah entertained without as much as a piece of paper for him to scribble on. Finally our number was called, and it took all of 30 seconds for the consular officer to give me the devastating news: Josiah’s visa was denied. My tears and pleading couldn’t get past the bullet-proof glass. Once again, we had to call off our home assignment.

The reasons behind the denial were complicated and not worth wasting your time on, but let me summarize in this way: In my fifteen years of navigating U.S.immigration, I’ve learned that nothing is straightforward, nothing is clear, and the laws are so nebulous that no one really knows how to interpret them, even the people in charge.

I know that’s a big deal to say, so I don’t say it lightly. In fact, two different times over the past decade, I was given blatantly wrong information about my kids’ immigration by U.S. government officials. I didn’t discover it was wrong until years later. These officials weren’t malicious, they just didn’t know the right answer. Practically no one does.

What I’ve discovered is that USCIS (immigration) and the Department of State (the embassies) don’t work well together. For example, just last year I unearthed the disconcerting news that though my older two children are U.S. citizens according to the Department of State and hold U.S passports(!); according to USCIS, they are only green card holders. I need to go through a whole other, expensive application process to ensure that they are fully U.S. citizens. Yet somehow, over 15 years, this information was never communicated to me by anyone at the U.S. embassy or at USCIS, despite my regular inquiries to get it right.

“Hire a lawyer.” If I had a nickel for every time a U.S. government official told me that, I would have enough money to hire a lawyer. I tried visiting the embassy. I tried emailing. I tried calling (but you can’t call U.S. immigration from an international number, because that would make too much sense). I waited on hold for hours and hours. All I wanted were basic answers to basic questions. But whenever I finally talked to a real, live government-hired person, the only answer I would get was “Hire a lawyer.”

The problem was that I had friends in the adoption community who hired immigration lawyers, and all the lawyers told them different things. The laws were so obtuse that even the lawyers couldn’t figure them out. 

So that brings us to Johnny’s story. By the time we got to Johnny, the immigration process had changed and I tried valiantly to figure out the path for his U.S. citizenship. I spent countless hours scouring government websites and comparing stories with other families trying to navigate the same immigration mess. But again, nothing was clear. 

So I took a stab in the dark and filed an application in February 2018. We waited and waited and waited until January 2020, when things finally started moving on it. In March 2020, almost two years later, we got the notice that they were almost ready to interview us at the embassy. That would have been the interview that would have gotten us Johnny’s U.S. passport. 

But as you all know, a lightning bolt hit the world in March 2020, and literally about a week before we would have had the interview, everything fell apart. We spent our last days in Tanzania frantically trying to expedite the process; we even stopped at the embassy one last time on our way to the airport. But the embassy was already shutting down and we were evacuated and it was a miracle that we even got Johnny into the United States. 

Even during a pandemic, no one at USCIS was willing to make exceptions. There was no way we could finish Johnny’s immigration process without being physically in Tanzania, and since we had no way of knowing when the embassy would open again or when we would be able to travel, and since we didn’t want to be harboring an illegal immigrant, we abandoned the first application that was fully paid for and had taken us three years, and started over again, completely, with a different immigration process.

This time our situation had become so complicated that we did hire a lawyer; we had no choice. Miraculously, we found a lawyer through the adoption grapevine who specializes in adoption immigration (there are very few who do) and suddenly we found ourselves talking to someone who knew what she was talking about. It was refreshing.

She started us down this new immigration pathway for Johnny, so now we are waiting again. But what this means is that while we are waiting, he cannot leave the United States because he would not be able to get back in. 

Back in October, our lawyer submitted an application for us to be able to travel with him one time, and predicted we would get that document by March. But now it’s May and there’s no sign of it. I called USCIS and asked for an emergency travel document but they said that taking Johnny back to Tanzania was not an emergency and out of the question. I’d like them to tell that to my brokenhearted nine-year-old’s face. He just wants to see his best friend.

So all this means is that even though Johnny has been in our custody for almost six years and even though we applied for his citizenship over three years ago, we still can’t travel with him. It’s not a life or death situation and it’s not the end of the world but I am just so incredibly frustrated and sad. 

I don’t tell this story often, because it’s boring and disappointing and long (good for you if you made it this far) and I’m not looking for pity. But I do hope that my experiences can give you empathy for those navigating the U.S. immigration system, and advocate for its reform. Remember that many of these families share my same motivation–parents and children and siblings who are separated and trying hard just to live together in the same country. It’s really not that much to ask. 

So, Grace, Lily, and I will get to travel to Tanzania in just a few weeks. I rejoice in that, but the trip will be tinged with the loss of half of our family back at home. This wasn’t the way I was hoping this would go. It’s possible the boys can go next year, but we know that the longer we wait, there’s less of a chance that will happen. And even if they do go next year, Johnny’s best friend won’t be there anymore. 

As with any lament, I can complain and rage and beat my fists against the powers that be, but in the end I must relent and surrender to a sovereign God who holds all things in his hands. He knows. He sees.