Miami.- Lizette hoped that 2025 was finally the year of reunification of his family in the United States, a country in which he swore to defend the values of laws and the Constitution, renounce loyalty to any other foreign state or territory, and provide military or civil service if requested. Like many immigrants, one of the motivations he had to take the step to naturalize American was the possibility of promoting a petition to bring his parents to live with her. But it did not have a series of restrictions that would come from the hard hand of a new administration.
After going step by step the long bureaucratic road to the consular interview, Lizette dealt with the fact that only one of his parents was authorized to emigrate to the United States. The lucky one is his father, who can move to the American nation when he wishes because the consular authorities approved him.
On the other hand, Lizette’s mother must remain in the Cuba of misery and blackouts until he can demonstrate that US authorities are wrong to associate it with the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) and, therefore, consider it inevitable for the migratory benefit.
“I made the application in September 2023. They approved it in December last year and began to do all the procedures to continue; Affidavit (Declaration of economic responsibilities). They were made for interview on March 11. They (the consular authorities) demand that you make an appointment before the interview to review documents, and the day after I had given the appointment they told me that they were canceling it. They sent me two letters from the National Visas Center (NVC), saying that the interview was canceled, but they also went to the interview on March 11, where they were told that this cancellation was a mistake, ”Lizette summarized, desperate to find a solution.
“Already at the embassy, she enters and left my dad outside. When she entered, she was asked if it was from the PCC. It is worth noting that it was I who completed the forms and I do not know if the way I did it that they had to misunderstood her job and have associated her with the PCC. I put that she was head of the department of sciences of a school and involved in the system (Cuban government), a member or affiliate of the PCC.
Lizette’s case is not exceptional. During the last weeks, both immigration lawyers and petitioners have warned about this situation that extends to numerous families.
The lawyer Wilfredo Allen explained that he has received several recent communications on immigrant visa denials in Havana on the argument that the applicants, according to the jobs they had occupied, had to be members of the PCC.
Allen explained, in his opinion, that it is an abuse of power of the authority to consult and that, in three of the cases that have been presented to him, he, as a lawyer, is first focusing on requesting information and evidence to present motions with which the cases will be reconsidered to reopen.
The lawyer Laura Jiménez, also specialized in immigration, describes what is happening as “arbitrary denial” based on the fact that “the beneficiaries are being charged with a membership of the Communist Party.”
For the lawyer, the causes of these decisions are clear, are framed in the sanctions and measures that the current administration is putting, including prohibition of trips to the US of everyone who has been linked to the communist regime of Havana.
One of the cases, exemplifies, is “a man who retired 10 years ago and, nevertheless, in the decision of the consular interview they asked him for a Waiver (a statement) for alleged membership to the Communist Party. “His response as a legal representative is, first,” write to the consulate a legal argument to see if they reconside the decision. “
In lawyers’ opinion, these decisions are difficult to appeal, but not impossible. The lawyer Santiago Alpízar explains that there are alternatives and, in fact, in the documentation they receive (denied people) offer and explain that alternative.
“According to the law, it is the one who asks for the benefit that corresponds to prove with clear and convincing evidence that is eligible for the benefit they request. As always, that they hire lawyer services for this type of interview. There are embassies that even allow the beneficiaries to be accompanied by lawyers,” he said.
“I have gone to those interviews and I have resolved more complicated issues than those of the PCC, than that of Cuba next to the UJC are the smallest of all their similar ones in the came.”
But Alpízar does not stop denouncing that the arm of the dictatorship intends to extend, through its former militants, to the very cord of Cuban exile and the United States must protect itself. “The proof is Miami, where more than half of that militancy that denied or hid its membership to obtain residence and citizenship has come to carry out. There have been very few and counted those who have sincerely sincere on this issue of limits in eligibility to enter or obtain migratory benefits in the USA,” he accentuated.
It is possible that the officers are exaggerating, consider Allen. “But I have no problem that a person goes to an interview in any American consulate in the world and the consul tracks him, seek information and make sure that what the person is saying is true. That the interviews are deeper and are looking for more frauds, it does not bother me.” What bothers him, said the lawyer, is that a membership are imputed to people who were never members of that political party.
Although the lawyer hopes to find evidence to save his clients, including labor files and letters saying that they did not belong to the PCC, Lizette is concerned about the arbitrariness and discretion that he observes in the treatment of his own family.
“My father worked in the scientific pole, he is an electrician. I don’t know why they approved my dad and denied my mom. It is absurd. In the way they are assuming that you are from the PCC, everyone would be, anyone who works (in Cuba) would be. And the question is: how do you show that you did not belong to something?”
