Thread: Youth pastor's paperwork slip prompts family's deportation

Youth pastor's paperwork slip prompts his family's deportation

By Jim Sullinger
MCT NEWS SERVICE
2:00 a.m. August 3, 2009

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Unlike millions of illegal immigrants, Canadian Ben Neufeld attempted to stay within the law and keep his family in the United States as permanent residents.

Neufeld succeeded in getting his green card, but because of a paperwork mistake he made, his wife and oldest child were declared illegal residents.
So since January, Neufeld, the music director and youth pastor, at a church in Gardner, Kan., has been living legally in the United States without his wife and four children, visiting them monthly in Winnipeg, Ontario.

Neufeld's story is one of a paperwork mistake on his part, the complexity of immigration policy and a lack of notification of the mistake – until it was too late – by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Neufeld, 32, was born and grew up in Winnipeg. His uncle, pastor of a church in Olathe, Kan., told him about a music director job with the Fellowship Bible Church in Gardner in 2004.

Neufeld got the job and applied for a U.S. visa for religious workers. On the same application, he requested a support visa for his wife and son. The visas – good for three years – were granted, and the Neufelds moved to Gardner in January 2005.

Neufeld later sought permanent residency status, or a green card, for himself and his family, which began to grow once he arrived in the United States. Three of his four children were born after he arrived in Gardner.

He applied for a two-year extension of his work visa – the first step and a prerequisite for applying for permanent residency for himself; his wife, Ingrid; and their oldest child, Asher, 5. He put Ingrid and Asher on his extension application. He should have filed for them separately, officials said.

In January, he received a letter from U.S. immigration saying his green card had been approved, but two weeks later, letters arrived saying the application for Ingrid and Asher had been denied. They would have to leave the country and would not be able to return for 10 years because they had been in the United States illegally for more than a year.

Neufeld said that if the situation isn't cleared up by the end of the month, he will return to Canada.

http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/ ... ?uniontrib

In immigration, and when you use the restroom, you have to stay on top of that paperwork.

Mexicans have become the chosen people in our country, the Pastor should have claimed he was Mexican.

Yeah lets deport the ones who want to work and made a mistake on the application but keep the ones that jump the border.

OhThuRtyWoN Wrote:

Yeah lets deport the ones who want to work and made a mistake on the application but keep the ones that jump the border.

How about we just deport ALL illegal aliens. As a God fearing man, perhaps Mr. Neufeld needs to look at this as God's will.


A little insight in the "R" visa program:

Excerpt:

The R visa program, created by Congress in 1990, gives visas to thousands of foreigners to fill alleged domestic shortages among ministries, nunneries and other religious professionals. In 1998, some 11,000 foreigners received such visas. According to a 1999 General Accounting Office report, federal investigators have discovered R visa fraud rings involving churches and other religious institutions based in Colombia, Fiji and Russia.

The mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, had an R visa. So did four Palestinian men who worked for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and the Islamic Association for Palestine – both Muslim charities that the State Department has linked to the terrorist organization Hamas.

The 1999 GAO report highlighted persistent lapses in oversight. "Neither INS nor [the] State [Department] knows the overall extent of fraud in the religious worker visa program," the report concluded.

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30996