There is hope for Pablo the pizza delivery guy.
The illegal immigrant who was detained by immigration agents while delivering food to a Brooklyn Army base can still get a green card to stay in the country through his American wife — but it could take a while and may not be easy, legal experts say.
Pablo Villavicencio, who has been married five years, will need to return to his native Ecuador to complete the application — and US law says that anyone who is here illegally for more than a year can’t re-enter for a decade.
So he’d need to apply for a waiver from that rule — proving that his wife would suffer “extreme hardship” without him.
Immigration lawyer Ray Fasano says he thinks that will be a “cake walk” for the father of two young girls so long as he’s been an otherwise law-abiding resident.
“They’ve got two little kids, so she’d have to struggle as a single mom,” said Fasano, the former chair of the Federal Bar Association’s Immigration Law section.
But attorney Kerry Bretz, who once worked as a lawyer for the old Immigration and Naturalization Service, doesn’t agree it would be so easy.
“It’s a very high standard,” said Bretz, a senior partner at Bretz and Coven.
“It has to be something more than financial and emotional … it’s almost always a serious medical condition. That’s almost always the way you’re able to demonstrate that hardship.”
The high standard is one of the reasons many undocumented immigrants with citizen spouses don’t apply for a green card, he said.
And that waiver won’t save Villavicencio from deportation for now, the legal eagles say.
For that, he’d either need to quickly obtain a stay of deportation — which will also require him to prove “extreme hardship” for his wife — or local ICE officials could simply agree to let him go for now, according to Bretz.
If he’s allowed to stay while the green card application is being processed — which could take a year — he would only need to return to Ecuador for a few weeks to do an interview if and when it’s approved, Faisano said.
But if he’s deported in the next few weeks, it could take up to two years to process the application over there — “with no guarantee of success,” said Bretz.
All that assumes he only crossed the border into the US without documentation once — it is “almost impossible” to get a green card through marriage with multiple entries on your record, Bretz says.
“You’re better off having a criminal history,” he said.
Even people who are in the country legally aren’t guaranteed permanent residency when they marry a US citizen — they can still be rejected for reasons such as a criminal record or certain communicable diseases, he says.