Immigration

I Left The U.S. To Save My Marriage

My American dream was a nightmare

Countless stories have been written about the pandemic. But there’s one teeny-tiny angle that some of you may have failed to consider: immigration.

In a year when the world stopped flying, assigning visas, and all the immigration-related offices were either closed or solely operating with a skeleton crew of essential workers, my big American dream turned into a nightmare.

This is the story of how I was trapped in the States, legally married to a U.S. resident, without having a legal permit to work or provide for myself, while being abused by his family.

“What if you guys get married?”

I’m from Venezuela, a communist devastated country. After a three-year-long online relationship, this was the second time his mother invited me to visit them in the States. That January morning, we were at her house having breakfast, and she popped the question.

-“ If you guys get married, you would receive a work permit in 4, 6 months tops, become a resident in less than a year, meaning that you could visit your parents whenever you want.”

I almost spilled orange juice all over her. She has paid for everything during my visits, yes. But a wedding was too much to ask, and I had plans to go back home anyway.

-“Okay, but my dogs live in Caracas, and I can’t leave them there,” I responded skeptically, chewing over the idea and the pancakes we were having and keeping in mind the possibility that things could go wrong.

-“Ah, that’s not a problem!” She explained. “We can bring them.”

-“Yes, I understand that’s possible, but it costs $3,000, and I don’t have the money to do it.”

-“Don’t worry. I’ll pay for it!” She retorted.

-“Right! Thank you very much for the offer. I would have to think about that a little bit more.”

-“Think about it! We have time, but the faster you get married, the faster you will have your work permit and the opportunity to visit your family. Then you can move to an apartment, my son will resume his studies, and you can open a dance studio, getting a license as a professional dancer…You’ve already talked about getting married, right?”

We both blushed and hurriedly exited stage left. Certainly, we had talked about getting married, but not this way. We had thought of it more as an ultra-private event on the beach in which we vowed always to be together.

At first, I let that proposition go. In just a few days, I was going to Phoenix, Arizona, to participate in the world’s most important dance event of the genre I’ve practiced for 6 years.

Needless to say, I couldn’t think about anything else. The tickets, lodging, and reservations were another of his mother’s gifts to me. I was intensely love-bombed.

I came back from Phoenix, and this time I saw a few people using face-masks during the flight. I thought they were exaggerating but kept my distance.

As soon as I walked through the door, I started coughing. One week after, we all had a “nasty cold” that lasted for several weeks. I couldn’t walk two blocks without feeling exhausted, so we schedule a doctor’s appointment.

It was the first time I had a swab test done, and it came back negative for streptococcus and influenza.

What kind of virus did I have? I will never know. PCR tests weren’t a thing back then. In the following months, I was tested numerous times for COVID-19, and I have always come out negative; maybe it was a severe case of cold feet.

While I was recovering, I thought about that proposal. It was completely logical, right? Marrying the man I love, starting a new and exciting life in a country with running water, bringing my dogs, and being able to visit my family once a year.

Most importantly, she was going to support us through the whole process. It was the perfect plan!

I grabbed the apple and took a big bite:

She was ecstatic to hear we were accepting her offer and getting married. She scheduled an appointment with her immigration lawyer, who charged $5,000 to help us with our case.

He confirmed everything: my work permit and my residence would be a matter of months. The only thing I needed was to have a medical exam, translate my birth certificate, and a Financial Sponsor.

A Financial Sponsor is a Green card holder or U.S. citizen that makes enough money to provide anything an immigrant could need until obtaining citizenship. That process can take anywhere from 6 to 10 years, maybe more.

Throughout that time, if the sponsee becomes unemployed, sick, or in debt, they can sue their sponsor to make them financially responsible for their expenses. Typically only a loving spouse assumes such a tremendous risk.

According to the USCIS, “the law requires a sponsor to prove an income level at or above 125 percent of the Federal poverty level.”, at the time, that was around a $2,100 monthly income.

My soon-to-be husband wasn’t anywhere near that, but she offered to sponsor me. My sponsor could be anyone; a sibling, a husband, a mother-in-law… but as I said, assuming that burden is too big a pill to swallow.

There are exceptions to the rule, such as the “Violence Against Women Act,” which offers the possibility of self-representation to women victims of extortion and abuse.

A green card turns into a persuasive tool when you have no legal permit to work, means to go back to your country, contacts, and don’t speak English fluently.

Nevertheless, she was completely on board, so I didn’t need to do any more research. We began to plan the wedding, and we needed to get married as soon as possible. You see, she wanted to travel to Spain in March to see her siblings.

We only had 3 weeks to pull that off, and she called us night and day to ensure everything was on point.

And they lived happily ever after:

We were married on March 11, 2020. It was possibly one of the last weddings before the quarantine. Some of her guests canceled because they were concerned with what they saw in the news.

It was a wedding without hugs, without handshakes, and a little bit of dance and music. I always believed weddings were corny and that people made a big deal out of something that wasn’t that important. I strongly believed that right up to the day I began preparing for my own wedding.

For my own wedding, I wanted to go all-out. I wanted a cupcake tower instead of a traditional cake, white flowers, and a non-white dress covered in crystals. I glued each crystal by hand to make it perfect.

My family and friends attended the wedding via video call. My husband’s cousins took our wedding pictures. They are from his mother’s side and work as photographers at events, so that was a no-brainer.

When we shoot the first group photo, my hyper-vigilance spiked: she stood right in between us, literally separating husband and wife.

At the moment, I can remember thinking, “how can she not realize that she’s supposed to go next to him or stand beside her boyfriend? Ah! But she knew what she was doing… The one that wasn’t understanding what was symbolically happening was me.

Then, everything spiraled downwards:

Two days later, a health emergency decree in Europe was followed by a massive cancellation of flights, hotels, and dreams. We got stuck together during the year that brought out the worst in everyone.

The U.S. immigration process requires you to take a physical exam. I already had all the vaccines that a person of my age should have.

Obviously, I don’t carry that certificate with me; it’s probably buried under the dozens of boxes of memories my mother treasured from the childhoods of her four daughters.

So, I had to get another shot of every vaccine known to man to pass the exam. The next day — when my arms were still numb from the barrage that was the immunization cocktail that possibly protected me from COVID-19 all these months — the three of us went together to visit our top-rated apartments to rent.

I came home tired, feverish, but excited about the places we’d seen, and I went to the kitchen to grab a bite. Then, I heard clearly when she — who was casually talking upstairs over the phone with her boyfriend — nonchalantly mentioned that the apartment project was no longer going to happen and that my dogs weren’t coming either.

-“Now that we’re confined, with the pandemic and the Coronavirus, none of that makes sense. I don’t know if they are going to move this year or the next.”

I’d already let her go through our stuff looking for drugs that I’ve never used. I had already graciously endured her entering our room without knocking.

I had accepted all the plans, changes, schedules, and suggestions on how we should live our lives. But there, on the verge of exploding, I asked my husband to go up to speak with his mother and confirm what I heard. I wanted to know whether it was a mistake… or a final decision, like the last nail on a coffin.

COVID-19 is here to stay:

Understanding the scope of what confinement would mean worldwide was impossible to foresee in March 2020. Thinking that we would go through a whole year lockdown before accessing a vaccine was unthinkable.

I couldn’t accept that instead of having a conversation together in which we reached agreements facing the facts, I found out by mistake that my life was not going to be what was expected.

After all, one reason for moving to the States was to flee from a dictatorship, I thought.

The disappointment on his face confirmed that all my fears were true. The frustration that I felt at that moment surpassed my self-regulation skills, and I dropped my sandwich on the plate with the subsequent splattered tuna on the table.

-“What are you doing?” He exclaimed.

-“What’s going on?” She yelled from upstairs.

-“Nothing, nothing, don’t worry. She dropped something.” He called back to her to calm her down, but she was already coming down the stairs to interfere.

By the time she got to the kitchen, I had already thrown the rest of my sandwich in the trash and was washing the dishes as I struggled to hold back the tears in my eyes.

-“What happened? Are you guys fighting? Tell me what happened!” She demanded to know.

-“You have helped us a lot, and I really can’t talk right now. Excuse me. I just can’t.” Then, I turned my body, set the cup I was drinking from in the sink and walked up to our room.

-“We have to talk. Tell me, what happened?” She said, chasing me through the living room, trying to grab me by the arm.

-“I can’t talk now. I can’t talk!” I repeated in exasperation as she followed me upstairs. I finally reached the room and closed the door behind me.

I needed space to center myself after being in fight or flight mode. Lacking any limits, boundaries, or common sense, she opened the door and stood under the lintel.

-“I need you to tell me what happened!” She yelled.

-“I can’t talk right now, don’t you understand that I won’t talk right now. You don’t understand what a closed-door means?” I screamed at the top of my lungs from all the way across the room.

I had stupidly bitten the hook. A month later, she would use this episode to say that she felt her life was in danger. Apparently, refusing to satisfy a narcissist’s desires and demanding respect can pose a mortal threat for someone like her.

A comfortable dungeon:

“Tell Nataly that if anything happens, that if she yells at me again or I feel threatened in any way, I will call the cops, have them haul her off to jail, and then get deported. If anything goes missing, I’m going to call the police, put her in jail, and you won’t see her anymore. This is my house, and I will only sign the financial affidavit if you both do everything I say, when I say it, without complaining. Okay?”

That became her favorite opening line. I was, for all intents and purposes, legally visiting the U.S., legally married. Though I was fighting with my mother-in-law, my situation was definitely pushing the envelope on what was comfortable… but I was there legally. Even so, I was scared. Constantly.

I was also in a conundrum:

• First of all, there were no flights.
• Second, being married to a resident makes it risky to leave the country. If I ever wanted to return using my Tourist Visa, I could be rejected at the airport. Immigration agents might assume that my intentions weren’t really having a vacay and deny me access to visit the country ever again.
• If he left the country for over 6 months before becoming a citizen, he could lose his residence. At the time, he was 3 years away from that.
• My Tourist Visa had expired in June after six months of travel. I completed the USCIS form in time, paid $500 for an extension but never receive an answer.
• If I stayed, I could end up living in the street or being deported in the blink of an eye or at the whim of some vindictive member of his family. Plus, the economic crisis reduced my husband’s chances of getting any job, so forget about him becoming my sponsor.

His whole family on his mother’s side took advantage of that. From sabotaging his job interviews to preventing him from becoming my sponsor to harassing us in every move we made. Insults, financial abuse, police threats without any basis became my day-to-day living.

A codependent family system:

They were triggering his epilepsy by making him deal with highly stressful situations that weren’t even his idea, to begin with. On top of it all, his mother chose to decorate the house with wine bottles, so you can imagine how that went in terms of his sobriety.

Stress, total isolation, and an inability to attend NA or AA meetings soon had him reaching for the nearest bottle and corkscrew. At one point, I was also going down that path, but I took refuge in a toxic friendship I managed to cut out of my life 5 years ago: smoking cigarettes became my unhealthy coping way to deal with all that nightmare.

He already had a year sober when we got married, and they were pleased to use that lapse as a weapon against us.

They even stole my wedding pictures so that “it would be impossible for us to prove that we were married and Nataly gets deported,” a baseless threat; those pictures aren’t the only evidence of our marriage. This was his attempt to intimidate us, and they temporarily succeeded.

Of course, we contacted many of our friends and acquaintances in the U.S. to be my sponsors, but some didn’t meet the criteria. Others preferred to stay out of such a great responsibility.

Obviously, none of his family members would sponsor me. Most of them are just flying monkeys in a toxic family dynamic that would have made Freud dedicate himself to gardening.

So I did what was best to allow my husband to stay away from all that drama by eliminating the possibility of him being manipulated by his mother and family.

The aftermath:

I write this article from Medellin, Colombia. The Latin American country that was the first to open its doors to flights from the U.S. and in which I have been immediately welcomed as a refugee.

We have consulted with Non-Profit Organizations and immigration lawyers to evaluate our next actions. However, COVID-19, in conjunction with immigration laws, poses a stark future for any couple seeking to build a life in the U.S.

Being Venezuelan, you can always ask for political asylum after spending a year and a day hiding from immigration officers. Last week Biden approved a “Temporary Protection Status" that gives more hope for people like us.

In my case, I started feeling suicidal after 6 months of abuse, around August 2020. So staying for another 6 months wasn’t an option for me.

America is nowadays a country in which the amount of money you can make — during a worldwide economic crisis — determines whether you can love or not. That exposes many immigrants to be abused while their residency process goes through evaluation.

I’m not saying that there should be no immigration laws, but guaranteeing the freedom and right to work for each human being should always come first. I believe that’s the compassionate thing to do in this new normality.