Love Story in Bad Form: How a Canadian
Married an American -- and Got Deported

By BARRY NEWMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Alexandrea Seminara is an American who married a Canadian, Scott Shelley, and went with him to visit his folks in Toronto. Before they left, Mr. Shelley was supposed to fill out a form that would let him back into the U.S. The form is two pages long. Mr. Shelley didn't fill it out.

Because of that, he lost his job teaching physics at Portland Community College in Oregon, and had his ability to find another job crippled. He and his wife used up their savings. They have lived apart for months -- she in their Portland apartment, he in a 12-by-12 room in a junkie-infested house in Vancouver with no place to cook and a toilet down the hall.

And, because of that form, they have this memory to share:

Scott, at 2 p.m. last Feb. 5, calling Alexandrea from a detention cell at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Portland's federal building, telling her he is about to deported. Alexandrea, frantically calling a lawyer, being told there was nothing anyone could do, then rushing to the INS with three sets of underwear in a carry-on bag to find Scott already gone and a note saying, "Come find me at the airport."

Alexandrea Seminara and Scott Shelley

Scott, handcuffed, riding under guard in a van, kept in a room until his flight is called, being escorted to the gate, hearing his name paged, seeing it flash on a message board, begging to pick up the white phone and being refused. Alexandrea, wandering the airport, spotting her husband, rushing up to give him the bag.

"I was hugging her," he says, "and they said, 'OK, that's enough of that,' and they pulled us apart."

"Physically pulled us apart," she says. "I was, like, 'Are you kidding me?' "

No. No joke.

The power of Ms. Seminara's American citizenship was a meek match for the power Congress conferred in 1996 on America's gatekeepers. As of April 1997, under the amended Immigration and Nationality Act, they have had the right to boot her husband out of the country. And once they decided he had to go, Mr. Shelley no longer had a right to appeal, a right to counsel, or a right even to call his own Canadian consulate.

Yet what makes his trauma a gauge of the law's new reach is that this isn't a story of abuse. When Congress armed the INS with a stun gun, it was aiming mainly at fraudulent asylum-seekers; Mr. Shelley is just a Canadian guy who married an American girl. Yet he isn't a victim of an INS gone mad, either, only of an INS following -- to the letter -- a law drafted by a Congress taking the hard line on illegal immigration.

"The point was to stop people without proper documents from entering the country just by saying 'asylum,' " says Judy Rabinovitz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. "So Congress made a blanket rule and created one exception -- credible asylum-seeker. It's a summary procedure with dire consequences. It's being applied to anybody without proper documents. This isn't at all the population that Congress meant to get at."

But Scott Shelley was got at.

By failing to fill out a form, he fell within the law's sweep. And, by that measure, the inspectors who put him in their cell treated him fairly, even benignly. They had the authority to bar him, then and there, from returning to America for five years. But they were kind, hard as that is for Mr. Shelley and his wife to believe.

"It's freakin' Canada," Ms. Seminara says. "I mean, what's wrong with a Canadian?"

"Everybody thinks that," says Mr. Shelley. "Everybody goes, 'Hey, aren't you married to an American citizen?' "

The only place to sit in the 12-by-12 room is a mattress on the floor. They shift around on it, trying to get comfortable. Outside, a train rumbles by. In the next room, a stereo plays something loud by the Ramones. Ms. Seminara has driven north seven hours in her 1989 Toyota. Unable to leave the job that supports the two of them, she has driven up and back every weekend since that moment at Portland's airport.

"What I did was called a 'voluntary departure,' " Mr. Shelley says, "though I don't know how it's voluntary when I didn't want to go and I was handcuffed." His wife says, "It's the visa. The visa is bigger than any of us."

"What I've never been able to figure out is the purpose of this," says Mr. Shelley. "I asked the INS guy. He yelled at me. Just explain, why? Why would I not be able to go visit my family at Christmas?" Says Ms. Seminara, "It's the law. They passed it. We broke it."

But the wall these two ran into on their way home after New Year's may have been built less on the law than its side effects. Marriage to citizens does give foreigners an instant right to a green card: permanent American residency. Even so, the instant he married Ms. Seminara, Mr. Shelley was thrust into an INS maze in which "instant" is an archaic word.

A System Shifting

Start with the political assault of the mid-1990s on public assistance for legal immigrants. That triggered an unexpected rush to citizenship, which caused a surprise 18-month processing backup, which forced an unpredicted INS staff shift, which has now produced an unforeseen 18-month wait before a just-married U.S. citizen gets a green card for a foreign husband or wife.

Then check out this old rule: Foreigners who marry American citizens while overseas cannot enter the U.S. without first getting a permanent-resident's visa at a U.S. consulate. Foreigners who marry American citizens while already in the U.S. can't leave the U.S. unless they get a green card from the INS first.

When the paperwork was instant, more or less, the rules rarely diverted a wedding party. But now, with an 18-month wait, an American intending to marry an Italian in Tuscany best think twice; it will take time for the spouse to move stateside. And an American who weds a Japanese in Junction City had better plan a honeymoon in Vegas; unless the INS blesses the alien newlywed -- in advance -- with permission to return, Paris is out. And so is Toronto.

Ellen Yost, an immigration lawyer in Buffalo, has taken on a new class of clientele thanks to this. As she tells it: "A Canadian and an American used to come to me and say, 'We're married,' and I'd say, 'Just go to the INS.' That's all over now. Now I groan and say 'You need a lawyer, and we're going to get to know each other real well.' "

Banding Together

But Ms. Seminara never got to know a lawyer after her wedding; she didn't hear one groan until her husband was in handcuffs. And when she fell for a foreigner on Feb. 23, 1997, the law wasn't on her mind, either, just a band called the Smiths.

It happened in L.A. Ms. Seminara, 26 years old now and a kindergarten teacher in Portland, is what fashion followers might call a "modish goth" -- red lipstick, straight hair dyed black, bat tattoo on an upper arm. She hosts a Portland public-access television show about British pop. That February, the Smiths, from Manchester, were playing Los Angeles. She went. So did Mr. Shelley, who is 28 and a modish goth, too.

He had flown in from Toronto. They met on the concert line and talked all night. A month later, he flew to Portland for a week, and on his last day they went to a judge and got married. "Not thinking, he's Canadian, I'm American," she says. "We had lunch and said, 'How about it?' " He says, "We knew one of us would end up in the other's country, just not which one or which country."

Mr. Shelley was a first-year doctoral student at the University of Toronto and not enjoying it. In June, he drove to Portland, toying with the idea of quitting school and finding work as a teacher. He and his wife filled out a sheaf of INS forms: her application to bring him into the U.S., his for a green card and a temporary work permit, a medical form, a fingerprint form, a form to prove Ms. Seminara wasn't too poor. They took them to the INS office and paid the fees. Two days later, work permit in hand, Mr. Shelley landed a job as a $15,000-a-year part-time physics instructor at Portland Community College.

They found an apartment, acquired cats, innocently drove through two border posts on visits to Vancouver and Tijuana, where they were waved through, as are most people. The following December, they flew to Toronto for the holidays. On Jan. 5, they went to the airport to fly home. The INS has inspectors in Toronto's main airport. Mr. Shelley showed his passport and, when asked, volunteered that he and Ms. Seminara were married and that his green card was in the works.

Not the best answer. Mr. Shelley hadn't applied for permission to return -- a legalism known as "advance parole."

Prison Mentality

Getting a grasp on advance parole takes some mental exercise: Think of America as the land of the free and the rest of the world as prison. Foreigners already in America and seeking to stay are like prisoners on parole. Those with an urge to do some time abroad must apply -- in advance -- for parole to return to the U.S.; otherwise, they can't come back.

Mr. Shelley doesn't recall the INS officer at the counter in Portland telling him about advance parole. It isn't mentioned on the 12-point checklist the INS sent Ms. Seminara with that sheaf of forms. If the form was in the sheaf, Mr. Shelley might be excused for not noticing: It is foggily titled "Application for Travel Document" and covered by a sheet of solid fine print.

Halfway down column one, the fine print says advance parole is issued only for "emergent personal or bona fide business reasons." It doesn't explain. (When asked, INS officers define "emergent" as "emergency.") On page two, the fine print says leaving the U.S. without advance parole "shall be deemed an abandonment of the application."

Oops. That means Mr. Shelley's paperwork went out with the garbage.

Hearing his entreaties at Toronto's airport, the INS inspector may have felt merciful. He let Mr. Shelley fly on to Portland for something called "deferred inspection." The INS Buffalo district director, John Ingham, who runs the Toronto post, can only infer the inspector's reason: "Because it looked like the alien may have been able to overcome the grounds for his inadmissibility."

But not all INS officers, as Mr. Shelley would soon find out, read the rules the same way.

He and his wife resumed their Portland routines. Mr. Shelley called the INS and made an appointment for Feb. 5. That day, he delivered his regular physics lecture and then headed downtown for the federal building and oblivion. That afternoon, he was chucked out of the country.

Not until much later did Mr. Shelley learn that his month in "deferred inspection" was spent in a legal fantasyland: He may have gotten out of bed in Portland that morning, but by law he had never set foot in the U.S. So he would have no right to call the Canadian consulate. And, as a foreigner in want of proper documents, he was inches away from the new immigration law's nastiest trap: expedited removal.

Claws of the Law

Congress came up with this thunderbolt to jolt the phonies who cheat their way into the U.S. with fake papers or none at all. Until April 1997, those types got a hearing. Not now. If they fear persecution and show it, an INS officer can let them claim asylum. If not, the officer consults a supervisor and can immediately run the rogues out of the U.S. and keep them out for five years.

Civil libertarians call expedited removal a betrayal of due process. They filed two federal lawsuits last November challenging the constitutionality of the law. The suits tell tales of foreigners the INS has allegedly banished by mistake: a woman from Honduras who had overstayed a previous visa because she gave birth prematurely; an English couple with a U.S. business and multiple-entry visas good for 10 years; a Chinese woman with a visitor's visa on her way to the U.S. to buy plumbing fixtures. In each case, INS officers concluded that these visitors intended to stay.

The General Accounting Office also saw flaws when it scrutinized the program from April through October last year, but decided the INS was fixing them. One fix was a memo the INS sent to its field staff last December. It recommends that less guileful arrivals be granted a chance to correct the errors of their visa applications -- back where they came from.

From last August through January this year, the INS turned around 240,000 people who showed up at borders and ports with imperfect visas or expired passports. Another 29,000 were banished for five years. And 31,000 banishment candidates were let off the hook and simply sent packing. Scott Shelley, in the view of the INS officers who greeted him that day in Portland, belonged in the last bracket.

The man in charge of those officers is David Beebe, Portland district director. He is tall and lean, his manner precise, controlled. He sits at the glass-topped table in his office at the federal building with Mr. Shelley's file open before him.

He says: "Our officers concluded that, Mr. Shelley, you are an intended immigrant not in possession of an immigrant visa. Your intent is to resume permanent domicile in the U.S. Why? Because you are married to this young lady here in Portland. Therefore, you are not admissible to the U.S. as an intended immigrant."

Mr. Beebe folds his hands. "This category of applicant was identified by Congress in 1996 as subject to expedited removal. It is Mr. Shelley to a T."

That Mr. Shelley didn't know about advance parole Mr. Beebe finds incredible. "I submit that we told him about the process," he says. Nor can he fathom why an officer in Toronto let Mr. Shelley in: "I would have refused his admission."

"If he had been formally removed," Mr. Beebe goes on, "he would have faced the five-year bar. We chose not to put him through that. We granted him the privilege -- not the right -- to withdraw his application. In his moment of confusion, we took him out of harm's way. We allowed him to get the next plane out of town."

The plane deposited Mr. Shelley in Vancouver, his car still parked at a 15-minute spot in Portland. It could have been worse. By the time his plane landed, the INS had already approved his wife's petition to bring him into America. Naturally, he had to file all his papers again -- and, until affirmed, keep out of the U.S. He knocked around, found his rooming house, put in a phone and became a pest. After one more medical exam and sheaf of forms came one more set of fingerprints. It takes the FBI four months to screen them; a call every three days livened that up. The National Visa Center in New Hampshire got a call every two days.

Between calls, Mr. Shelley mailed off applications for a U.S. job. His Portland school had to hire someone else. But with a transcript brimful of A's, he has made short-lists for full-time posts at Macalester, Haverford and Tulane. Trouble is, they all want face-to-face interviews, and Mr. Shelley can't get into the country.

It will be touch-and-go: The U.S. Consulate in Montreal has at last given him an appointment for mid-June. There, he will be asked to show that Ms. Seminara is truly his wife, and that her father, not the government, will pay his bills should he run out of money.

In the course of all this, Mr. Shelley has become something of an immigration expert. He knows that many others, unconnected to U.S. citizens, must wait far longer for America to open its door. Still, one thing baffles him: What was the point of that form he didn't fill out?

District Director Beebe, in his office, runs a finger down an advance-parole application. Why must a green-card candidate have an "emergent" reason to leave the country? Mr. Beebe doesn't address the question. He is focusing on the fine print. The form, it seems, is obsolete, and the INS hasn't revised it.

"This is old," he says. "The new form will talk about 'personal' reasons." So have the rules changed? Absent an 'emergent' reason, would the INS have let Scott Shelley take his wife to Toronto for the holidays -- had he just filled in that form?

"Advance parole for people like Mr. Shelley," says the district director, "is available for the asking."