Advance Parole

Hello,

Thanks to those that shared their experiences it encouraged me and my wife to travel to Canada for her work using AP.

The major problem we had is timing, her company 8 months in advance offered a course for her in Victoria, BC... plenty of time for AP but it took 9 months to get back to us and by then the course was over. We had to show proof of her intent including seminar dates so when they got back to us we received a letter along the lines of, 'Your dates have passed, do you have any other dates you need AP for?' so instantly we look for the next change and we lucked out and there was another one in May. We sent off the letter as well as some pages we printed out online showing the course, and they got back to us in a couple of weeks with the AP documents. Of course during this time the Presidency had changed and we began to worry. I figured as long as Daca wasn't repealed we would be good to go, plus the stories I read on this site was encouraging... although most everyone has traveled for humanitarian purposes to Mexico... not on business to Canada. We did not know how inquisitive they would be on where we went, what we did, who we talked to, etc.

So we left out of Portland, OR we had to get an eta (electronic travel authorization) from Canada for my wife to visit with her Mexican passport (eta takes about 5 minutes to apply for online and costs 7 bucks, we then got an email with a number and a message stating we can now enter Canada). We showed them the eta document at the counter in Portland and of course they had no idea what it was and we spent 25 minutes at the counter as they tried to verify it with the Canadians. They knew she no longer needed a visa to visit Canada but they had no way on their end to input this number and have the system 'ok' it. Long story short, it worked out, but I thought for a few minutes our trip was over before it even begun.

Canada was smooth, we showed the AP Documents and ETA and they let us in with no problem. The weekend went well, Victoria was pretty, her seminar was boring, we left 3 days later on Monday. We went from Victoria to Vancouver and I was thinking she would get inspected when we landed in Portland but actually she was inspected in Vancouver. Again, different from the stories on here... we dont think the US wing of Vancouver airport was familiar with the Daca stuff or the agents were new as we spent the entire hour layover in secondary as they tried to figure out what to do. Someone who seemed to know what was going on finally got the agents through the process. When I saw them finger printing her I was relieved... they asked her about the seminar, what she did in the US... and that was about it. We hurried to our flight which was boarding for PDX, and that was that.

I am now excited I can fill out I-130 and try to adjust her status, we've been married almost 6 years and I feel like I can FINALLY have a path towards helping her, this was stressful but worth it, I kept telling myself things would work out, we'd be fine.. and things did work out. I told myself if we got through this I would type out our situation and pass along any encouragement to someone reading this wondering if things will work out. Trump digs himself a hole every day, I dont seem him repealing Daca anytime soon. I am now renewing her Daca and filing I-130 so hopefully there is no lapses in her status that might somehow cause problems with her adjustment of status or employment.