Hi, I'm Hillary Walsh, a serial entrepreneur, award-winning immigration lawyer, law professor, TEDx speaker, and raving Phoenix Suns fan. Over the past decade, I've helped thousands of immigrants live free in the United States. I'm talking work permits, social security numbers, green cards, their citizenship, VAWA, T-visa, U-visa, and lots of successful appeals. Here's the thing. Immigration law is super complicated and legal advice? Well, it can be pretty expensive.
So I created the Immigration Law Made Easy podcast to share my 10 plus years of experience with you for free. So if you're looking for tried and true, no BS, step-by-step strategies and tips on how to win your immigration case and live truly free in the United States, you're in the right place, my friend. Let's get started. Hey friend, I'm so excited to introduce you to the substance, the muscles, the show me the money, where's the beef part of our Immigration Law Made Easy podcast.
Today's very first nuts and bolts. Here's the no BS conversation about what are the consequences? What are immigration consequences that might arise at the time of entering the United States? I think that there's so much to cover here that it was hard for me to keep this episode short, but the tips and tricks inside of this episode really shape how I want you to start thinking about immigration law. And this is what makes it easy, which is always ask more, no more assumptions.
The key one is the very first tip I talk about, which is a lot of people think that they entered the country illegally. In left and right, I help people see that you didn't enter illegally. You didn't enter without inspection. You actually entered legally and here's how I'm going to say that again. You actually entered legally and here's how. Enjoy. Hey friend, and welcome to another episode. I'm so happy you're here today. We're going to talk about some stuff that I know has been on your mind.
If you have ever entered the country or perhaps you're coming to the country as an immigrant and you want to make sure that you don't make any mistakes as we go along the way, or perhaps you're already here in the U S and you know that something's happened at the border or maybe you want to leave and come back and want to make sure that you're all good. But today's podcast episode is specific for all the things that can go wrong.
All the consequences of our actions intentional or not at the point of entry. So that's whether it's at the airport you're coming in, you're flying in at JFK airport or maybe you're coming into San Diego. If you are walking, let's say you're at the bridge in Douglas, Arizona and you're wanting to walk across the bridge or perhaps you are you're driving.
So maybe it's supportive entry and you're coming from Canada or you're coming from Mexico and you're driving and you're wanting to enter the U S. So everything that kind of goes on right then and there. So let's get to it.
One of the most common questions that we get are, you know, I came to the U S and I entered without permission or entered illegally or I came walking to the U S. This is really for a lot of my clients who are from Mexico, from Central America, a lot of clients from South America, Brazil, especially, and also Haiti and Cuba. A lot of folks really from the Southern hemisphere.
When we go south of the U S border, a lot of people are here in the U S and they entered the U S and they believe they entered without permission. And my first question is always as a lawyer is to challenge that and to think, did you really enter without inspection is the legal term. You might hear it as e we that is entered without inspection.
The acronym for that is E W I. And so an immigration law, we say e we, many people think that that's actually that's their case when in fact it's not because if you, for example, you may have been in a car and you were waved through by an immigration officer, this happens every single day. It really happened a lot in the nineties and early two thousands.
So if you were a kid asleep in the back of a car or perhaps mom and dad were driving or auntie or uncle were driving the car and they told you, close your eyes, look like you're asleep. And they drove the car through because they showed their U S passport and you were in the back of the car and no one ever asked you any questions. You did not necessarily enter illegally.
If I were your lawyer, I would ask a lot of questions to find out if perhaps you were caught what's called waved through and you can just imagine it where it's an immigration officer literally waving you through. Those are called wave throughs and there's a little bit more to it, but I just want to plant the seed in your mind that just because we think or we've been told or we've always thought that we entered illegally or we entered without inspection doesn't necessarily mean that's the case.
So that's a wave through you and that can happen even in the airport. You know, you could have gotten waved through at an airport.
It's less common just because the procedure, anytime you go through customs and border patrol in the U S it's pretty regulated where, um, at, at the border, especially our Mexican border, they have such a volume of traffic that if you're in the car and they see you and they don't ask you any questions or they ask someone else in the car questions about you and the other person answers and you're waved through.
I mean, a lot of times that's kind of a textbook wave through again, this isn't legal advice like for your specific case. I want to make sure that I stress that because as a lawyer, I want to make sure that I give you good advice, but know that I am not your lawyer. I am a lawyer. Okay. So I don't know your specific facts, but that in my experience would be a classic wave through situation. This is very different than if you're in the back of a semi and we hear about this all the time.
It's really tragic when this sort of thing happens and things go wrong. Um, but if you're in the back of a semi truck and you're waved through because the border patrol officer talks to the semi driver, but waves everyone else through, that's not a wave through that's being smuggled into the United States or possibly trafficked into the United States. But that is not what I would consider a wave through on those exact facts.
There's always more to explore, but I'm just giving you the quick and dirty on this. That's a wave through. Let's talk about what's called a key Lonton entry. He Lonton is the name of the board of immigration appeals case that established that these, that what I'm about to describe to you are considered lawful entries. So wave through is a lawful entry, but we also have where someone can be coming to the U S and it's a normal course of entry.
And we see this a lot where back in the day, people would be able to walk through immigration and be like, I'm just going through, or just crossing the border to go over there, to go to that grocery store. And there was no formal process for being asked about it, but it was very common. The immigration knew that people from one town on the southern side of the border would be going to another key Lonton entry in a wave through a really similar and can.
Oftentimes be considered the same thing and no one's wrong in doing that, but just know that if you're going through a normal place, the immigration knows that you're there again, I would put on my lawyer hat and think, I'm going to look at this key Lonton case and you can Google it and see what the things are that you kind of need to check the boxes on and prove to show that you have this lawful entry. But can I argue that this person does in fact have a lawful entry?
Because once you have a lawful entry that removes the negative immigration consequences of entering without inspection or entering illegally. Okay. So that's always the first place to start. When you think I entered illegally or my family member entered without permission or they went walking. I've had cases where, you know, we have someone who's walked across the border. They went on a footbridge into the U S but it was a lawful entry.
So just because we think I came walking, um, don't count that out as a lawful entry. It could very possibly be a lawful entry and you can read up about those things. Um, we'll include some links in the show notes for you. Okay. So you can kind of go straight to the case and, and get your hands on that information. Okay. So the first question when we think about it is, did this person actually enter without inspection? Did they enter e-whee? Yes, no, maybe.
If you came walking through the desert and it's, you know, a back road path where you never interacted with immigration officials, then yeah, I would say that's a pretty classic textbook case of having entered without inspection. Okay. If you entered in the back of a car, you probably, uh, like in the trunk or something like that, that is probably going to be regarded either as trafficking, smuggling, or an entry without inspection.
Okay. The next, um, question I have a lot of consequences for things that happen that are important for folks who enter with a visa. Now you can enter with your visa with someone else's visa or passport. You can enter with a U S citizens documents, driver's license, passport, those types of things. Um, and then you can also, um, have come to the border and just basically lied about who you are and asked to come in and you can be led in that way. And there are consequences for those things.
So let's kind of go through each of those. So if I'm entering with a visa and it is my visa, for example, it's very common for Mexicans to have what's called a border crossing card. And this is just, it's, it's a car that looks like a driver's license and you can come and go with that card rather than having to get your whole passport out, having all of these stamps all over in your passport. It just doesn't really make sense when you can use a card, come and go.
And those were really commonly issued really through the nineties. Um, and before that, so they're not as commonly issued now. A lot of times you'll just get a sticker in your passport, uh, your Mexican passport and you come and go on that visa and it's issued for like 10 years and you have multiple entries on it. Um, and you're good to go with it that way.
So whether you're entering with a border crossing card because you are Mexican or, um, because you're entering on a visa because you've gotten the sticker in your passport, or if you're one of our Canadian friends and you just have to show your passport, if it's your document and you're entering with it, you're good to go. Okay. So the only question I would ask though is have you overstayed? Did you come into the U S and overstay?
And I'll give you an example of this in a case that we actually ran into, um, that kind of got complicated, got a little bit sideways. And I want to make sure that you learn from all of our hard cases because I, I'm sure that they are popping up all over the place. Here's one of those cases. We have a 40 to 50 year old Mexican man who he always had a tourist visa and he always made sure to keep that tourist visa, um, current. He didn't want to let it expire.
You know, you'll have the visa and it will say, you know, it's issued on such and such date and expires on such and such date. And so many people, even when they're here in the United States and they've built a life here, they feel like having a current visa provides them some type of protection, even if they've been here for five, six, seven years after they entered with that visa. And I want to tell you that that is not the case. A visa, whether it's expired or not, does not matter.
A visa does not give you any protection. It does not help you in any way other than to show that you lawfully entered the country, however long ago when you got here, it of course provides you protection. If you're within the amount of time that that visa allows you to stay, which for most Mexican visas is six months. A lot of people from around the world get a three month tourist visa.
So if you're Guatemalan and you're here on a tourist visa, you're probably going to be here for a three month period. But if you overstay that three months, let's say you enter in January and it's April, it doesn't matter whether your tourist visa has expired or not because you have already overstayed your permission to be here in the country for the amount of time that you were allowed to enter with. Okay. So I'll go back to my story about my 40 to 50 year old Mexican man.
He entered in the early nineties with this tourist visa and then 10 years later, his visa was about to expire. So he left the country, went to Ciudad Juarez, renewed his tourist visa and then reentered with the new one. So now he had a new tourist visa because he thought that would give him some protection and just some peace of mind.
What that actually did though was create this whole can of worms that he opened up unknowingly because he didn't talk to an immigration lawyer or tune into a podcast like this. So let's learn from this mistake. Because he had overstayed his tourist visa for more than a year, when he left, he triggered what's called the 10 year bar, which means you're supposed to stay outside the U S for 10 years before requesting to come in. Yikes. That 10 year bar is issued that is triggered.
It goes up when you leave. It does not go up while you're here in the U S it goes up behind you as the door of the United States closes behind you. Okay. So when he left, he triggered the 10 year bar and then he lied on his tourist visa, a renewal by saying that he had not, he had never overstayed being in the United States when we know that he'd been here for 10 years and he was really only supposed to be here for six months.
So now he's made a fraudulent fraud or misrepresentation issue on his tourist visa application. And then the next problem is when he reentered the United States, he, he used a tourist visa and that means he's telling immigration officers, I intend to come in, take me at my word. I intend to come into the country for only six months because that's what his tourist visa allowed him to come in for. When in reality he had children here, he had a spouse here, he had a whole family here.
He'd been here for 10 years and he was coming back to continue living here. It was not coming back to be a tourist. Immigration regards that as a misrepresentation based on your intent as a tourist. So now we have three issues, the 10 year bar, fraud and misrepresentation to an immigration official for an immigration benefit to get his tourist visa renewed. And then when he reentered, he made a misrepresentation about what his actual intent was by using that tourist visa.
So this causes a lot of problems because then he needs, he wants to adjust his status. He wants to get his green card here, but now he needs waivers and we're going to talk about waivers a whole lot on this podcast. But the key thing to know about waivers is it's great if you don't need them. It's not that big a deal. If you do need them, you just need a qualifying relative for it and that's where things get complicated. But we'll save that for another day.
The way I see so many people trigger these consequences, immigration consequences really is by coming in as a tourist and getting married. Let's say you get married right away and you had sold your apartment. Let's say you lived in Venezuela, you sold your apartment, you come to the U S you get married to your U S citizen boyfriend and he petitions for you right away. That's wonderful, but it starts to look a lot to immigration officials.
Like you had a fraudulent intent by entering with your tourist visa. Did you really intend to be a tourist or did when you entered or did you really intend to kind of trick me? You got this tourist visa, so you're going to enter the country and that's where, where immigration starts to punish people for what they believe is a fraud or misrepresentation at the time of entry. So be careful if that's your situation and you're wanting to get married right after you get to the United States.
I may, if you let me know in the comments, I may do a whole episode on like what the rules are because there's a 90 day rule and does it apply and what are the, what are the things that go along with that? And can I, can I show that I really did have immigrant intent? We can do a whole episode on that. I want your input. I want to answer your questions. So let me know we're going to move on though, cause we have lots more things to discuss.
So those are the situations where you have entered with your papers, your visa, and we may find ourselves with fraud and misrepresentation issues. Okay. Let's talk now about what if you enter with someone else's visa? So this is super common, especially back when we had so many border crossing cards. We, you may even do it with someone's lawful permanent resident card.
You know, someone might have a green card in the U S and it's like your sister and you're trying to get her into the U S from Mexico or something like that. So you mail your sister or next time you're with her, you give her your lawful permanent resident card for her to enter with you to look a lot of like, et cetera, super common. And if this is something that's happened to you or you've used a family member or friend or you bought it, however it is that you went about it, no judgment here.
It's waivable. It's not like a criminal offense. Um, you know, it's not prosecuted like a criminal offense. Uh, so, you know, take that stress out of it. If that's what your mom or your dad have done, aunt or uncle, um, you will need a waiver though, most likely because you've committed a fraud or misrepresentation at the point of entry.
Just like if you enter with your own tourist visa and you intend to overstay and you've committed fraud or misrepresentation, either case, you're going to need a waiver, um, for this fraud or misrepresentation. The one big snag, and you want to be really careful with this is if you've used someone's U S birth certificate, their order, U S passport. Now driver's licenses, like an Arizona driver's license, you don't need to be a U S citizen in order to get an Arizona driver's license.
So let's say you use an Arizona driver's license, that doesn't mean that you have claimed to be a U S citizen. You'll just like that. Those are really, as an immigration lawyer, I always start to get really my ears perk up where it's like, Ooh, this could be complicated. And it's called a false claim to U S citizenship. And even with this, there are still exceptions to the rule. That's the thing about the law. There's very few situations where it's like black or white in the law.
We deal in this space where there's so much gray and all these different exceptions and all these different paths. Remember at the beginning of this podcast, I was like, Hey, did you enter with or without inspection and the answer should be, well, I don't know. Let's talk about it because maybe I was waved through. Maybe, um, my family member said, maybe it wasn't even way through. My family member just said that I was a U S citizen. Is that a false claim to U S citizenship?
Not if you didn't make it. So there are always exceptions to the rule. So if your heart kind of sinks because you're like, Oh yeah, um, my mom entered with her sister's U S birth certificate. Like what do I do? And I would say that's going to be a really hard case.
I'm sorry to say, but I would want to ask a lot of questions about what timeframe that was because the bars for us, um, false claims to U S citizenship, they only apply at certain times and we can Google that again, if we want to, we'll probably do a whole episode on this, but from a 30,000 foot view, just know that if you entered with someone else's paper, the papers is going to be the rule of thumb here.
Um, if you entered with someone else's papers, it's waivable in almost every single situation, except if they're U S citizen proof of U S citizen docs. So like a U S passport or a U S birth certificate, you can't waive that, but you can argue that there's an exception to the rule.
Waveable would be admitting I did this exception to the rule would be, I may have done this, but there are these other things that mitigate it, which means it, it shouldn't, it shouldn't be the black mark on my case anymore. Okay. So those are, if you enter with someone else's stuff, now what happens if you bring other people's children in your kids, someone else's kids, um, there are different consequences if you are a U S citizen versus if you are an immigrant.
So if you're a U S citizen, it doesn't, if you have brought people into the United States, um, that are, that, that didn't have permission to enter the U S let's say you're a U S citizen and you drive your nieces and nephews, three of your nieces and nephews across the border and tell the border patrol that they're your children. If you are not criminally prosecuted for this, like let's say you're not caught, um, there's no immigration consequence for you.
You're not going to like you lose your citizenship. You're not going to get in trouble in terms of immigration law. And in fact, you can even like, you don't even lose your ability to petition for someone else in the future. There really is no consequence for you on the immigration law side of things. Of course it could like damage your credibility and that sort of thing.
Um, but in terms of your rights as a U S citizen, to be able to petition for people and vote and all of that, it doesn't impact it. You could get in trouble criminally if you are caught, um, but you know, for, for human trafficking or smuggling, I know here in Arizona, they're trying to pass a statute that says it doesn't matter really who you are, even if they're your own children, if you're bringing someone in, we're going to criminally prosecute you for human trafficking.
So it's not the existing law right now, but it has been in talks, um, here in Arizona specifically. So there can be criminal consequences if you're a U S citizen and you're bringing people to the United States without permission. And they can be very severe, even if they're your family member.
But if you're undocumented or you are a lawful permanent resident, or if you're just someone who is here on a tourist visa, whatever it may be, if you're bringing, if you've brought your kids, like your biological or step children, and that's like a legal term, um, under immigration law. So, you know, you're married stepchildren would be you're married to the kids, mother or father before the child turns 18. Um, so those would be stepchildren.
If that's the case and you've brought them, then we can waive that. Like you can get a waiver for this, but if they're someone else's children and you're caught doing this, you pretty much, there's no waiver for it. It's extremely like how I mentioned a minute ago, it's really, really frowned upon. Um, so be very cautious.
And if, if that's the situation where your family member, like I have a client, for example, who she brought her daughter, um, to the United States when the daughter was an infant, she should be very cautious before going to the mom. She'd be very cautious before going to Ciudad Juarez in Mexico to consular process because she's going to get hit with an alien smuggling ground of inadmissibility once she goes to that interview. So these are things to really look out for.
And again, there's all these immigration consequences that happen at the point of entry. You can even kind of get in trouble. Um, if you're just on the receiving and coordinating end of, of air quote, alien smuggling, I hate the word alien. No one's an alien here. You know, we're all brothers and sisters and human beings, but in immigration law, it's, it's regarded as alien smuggling.
So this is just something to keep in mind that if it's not your immediate family member, like your kid or your spouse, um, you know, this is a really big problem in immigration law and it's something to be taken very seriously. I hope this is helpful. Um, the last thing that I want to touch on. I hope this is helpful and not, not to immigration lawyer. Please ask me follow up questions because I want to make sure that I answer your questions.
I want to talk to you briefly about what happens if I am re entering. So I described for you the 40 to 50 year old Mexican man when he left, he'd been here for over a year. So when he left, he triggered the 10 year bar. If you're here without permission or you overstay for more than six months, but less than a year, um, you are going to trigger the, if it's over six months, but less than one year, it's going to be the three year bar.
So those are the two ways that you can trigger these different bars and they're when you leave. Now, when you re enter, let's say that you trigger the 10 year bar, I'll give specific facts because I find that to be easier to work with really common fact pattern. Um, and you'll notice that I talk about Mexicans, Guatemalans, um, so very much because that's the main client base that I serve here in Arizona, um, Kansas, Oklahoma, even up in Vegas where we serve a lot of people.
That's our most common client base because of our location. And because all of our staff is bilingual in English and Spanish, so it just makes sense. But so let's use this fact pattern. We have, let's say Maria is 35 years old. She came to the U S in the late nineties, um, without permission. Okay. Late nineties came without permission. And then 10 years later, she returned to Mexico because her mom was sick and she wanted to see her mom always really heartbreaking cases.
We see them all the time where it's like, you know, that you can't leave because you know, there's some type of immigration consequence, but mom's sick and I don't care. I'm going back home and I, I can not imagine being in that situation, but my heart breaks because I would go to, okay. Um, Maria leaves and then she comes back again, walking across the desert. It's a two day walk. She hires a coyote. She enters and she's not apprehended or anything else.
Maria's daughter wants to petition for her. Her daughter's now, um, you know, 20, I don't know if my age is on Maria is going to add up, but pretend that Maria is normal and has now a 21 year old U S citizen daughter. She also has a U S citizen husband. Both of them want to petition for Maria. They want to know how they can help her. The problem is, is that when Maria left, she triggered the 10 year bar.
And when she entered without inspection, when she came back, she triggered the permanent bar. And when I say triggered, that's fancy lawyer speak. It's kind of annoying. Sorry, I can't help that I do it. That just means it, it initiated it. It instigated it. It started it like the domino fell for the permanent bar and there's no waving the permanent bar outside of very specific case types like VAWA TV set and new visa and asylum.
Okay. So those are like your four main ways to wave the permanent bar. So Maria is going to be in a tough position because the permanent bar means that you are barred from getting any immigration benefit, like a green card, unless you spend 10 years outside the United States. So Maria is kind of stuck. She is really, really stuck unless we can help her with VAWA, a U visa, a TV, so our asylum. Okay. So these are all very common things. I mean, we deal with this all day, every single day.
So if you have questions, please reach out to us. You can email us at info at new frontier.us or just come find us on social. We are all over social at new frontier immigration law on Instagram. We're new frontier immigration law on Facebook and then obviously on YouTube as well. We want to help solve your problems. We want to make immigration law easy for you. And I hope that this is a helpful way for you to see that, yes, this is complicated, but I can do anything.
Even if it's complicated, I can figure this out. We will spend more time talking about other immigration consequences. And hey, if you are interested in immigration reform, my, one of my dreams that I want to see before my kids leave the house for college, I've got my oldest are nine. So in the next nine years, my vision is that we see all the bars for immigration purposes taken away.
If you enter the U S you leave and you come back like Maria did, she's not permanently barred even though she has a U S citizen husband, even though she's got a U S citizen kid over the age of 21, she's screwed. Okay. So immigration law is screwing over our families and oftentimes it's just one family member. And so you're stuck here in the U S and everybody says they support legal immigration and I support legal immigration too, but not when the rules, when, how can things be legal?
If the rules are impossible to follow or the rules are so, if the punishment doesn't fit the crime, you know, law and policy have to make sense within the context of what society accepts. I no longer accept what was set up in 1996 when all these bars went into place.
And when I think about all the kids who are in school with my children, they don't have a mom or they don't have their dad here in the U S or their mom or dad is here in the U S but there's no way for them to legally fix their status. So they have a family here, but their papers are unattainable. I think this is an unacceptable way of doing business as an American. So if you are an advocate and you've heard this and you're like, wow, look at all the ways things can go sideways. I agree.
Things can go sideways a lot, but the positive thing folks, if you are in the thick of this is lawyers are on your side, like find the right person who is going to fight for you and figure out a way for your family to make it work. Reach out to us if you need us. Don't give up hope.
I think that's the biggest thing to take away is these are consequences, but a lot of them we can find exceptions to, we can find waivers for, and I'm literally making fists with my hands because I'm like, and then we just got to go to battle. We got to have lawyer warrior mentality. Thanks so much for joining us. And I can't wait to see you again on the next episode. The immigration law made easy. My friend, I'm so glad you joined me today.
If you have a friend or family member who may need some immigration law guidance or even just day to day encouragement, please send them a text or email or a DM on social media and say, Hey, I think this podcast is going to help you. I sure wish someone had given me the tips I'm sharing here years and years ago when I was starting out as an immigration lawyer. Thank you so much for being here. I'll see you next week. At the same time.