Did you enter the United States illegally? Are you wondering how the permanent bar will affect getting a Green Card in the future?
Hi, I’m Hillary Walsh, I’m an immigration attorney and I’m here to answer those questions so hopefully you’ll be reassured, and if not, we’ll help you find solutions that will solve the problem of the permanent bar. My law firm is New Frontier Immigration Law and we are helping people all over the United States. Our physical office is in Phoenix, Arizona, but I am a military wife and because I have lived a nomadic lifestyle for many years, my opinion is that I can help anyone wherever they are because I probably lived there at one time or another.
You may have heard of the three-year bar, you may have heard of the ten-year bar, for both bars you can get a waiver. However, there is no waiver, outside the context of VAWA, for permanent bar. Let’s talk about situations where someone entered the United States without permission and accumulated time of illegal presence. He left and then returned without permission. We will look at different scenarios so that you can understand a little bit about how this would apply to you.
Here’s why knowing about the permanent bar is so important: There’s no way you can fix your status in the U.S. or in your home country, unless you’ve already spent 10 consecutive years outside the U.S. This is a very important rule. It was basically assigned to penalize people who had violated the immigration rules once and then repeated it by entering the country without permission a second time. Or after being here for too long.
Let’s look at some scenarios to help you understand what the rules are for permanent bar. The important thing is to start by measuring “unlawful presence,” that is, the time you were here without permission. Perhaps you stayed longer than your visa allowed, you stayed longer than the 6 months allowed, more than the 90 days allowed. Once the time you were allowed to stay expires, so if it was 90 days and you stay 91 days, you have already accumulated time (1 day) of unlawful presence. So, this begins to take on importance for the permanent bar for cases after April 1, 1997.
You may remember that in the 1990s, Bill Clinton signed a law called the IIRAIRA (Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act). It was a great immigration reform that completely changed the way we apply immigration law until today based on the state of immigration in the mid-90s. So, if you have accumulated a year of illegal presence in total, and you have illegally re-entered, then you have what is called a permanent bar. You may have accumulated one day here in Phoenix, 30 days in California, and 180 days elsewhere, but after you have accumulated a year in total days of unlawful presence, you cannot adjust your status or get a Green Card (in the U.S. or in your home country) until you have been gone for 10 years.
We know this is a complicated issue so we will review the following part “Legal, Illegal Presence and Examples” in the second part of this blog “Permanent Bar and Green Card (Part 2)” as well as how we have helped people who have this block to adjust their status, without leaving the country!
Hillary Walsh is one of America’s foremost immigration attorneys — a nationally recognized advocate whose career has been built case by case, client by client, in the most challenging corners of immigration law.
For over a decade, Hillary has represented immigrants, asylum seekers, trafficking survivors, and families facing deportation in proceedings before the Ninth, Sixth, and Fifth Circuit Courts of Appeals, the Board of Immigration Appeals, and immigration courts across the country. Her legal expertise spans removal defense, asylum, VAWA, T Visa, U Visa, green cards, and naturalization — the full breadth of immigration law, with particular depth in protection-based relief for vulnerable populations.
Her work has reached the highest levels of American jurisprudence. Hillary was invited to author an amicus curiae brief for a U.S. Supreme Court case — a distinction extended to attorneys whose command of immigration law is recognized at the national level.
Hillary founded New Frontier Immigration Law in 2019 with a simple but radical belief: that every person deserves a fighting chance, and that there is a solution for every problem. That legal philosophy has guided thousands of client outcomes across Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and communities nationwide.
She doesn’t just represent clients in immigration court; she shapes how immigration law is argued, understood, and applied.
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