‘We’re not ready to give up’: Central Texas mom fights for daughter’s citizenship

AUSTIN (KXAN) – In August 2023, Tina packed everything she and her daughter owned into their car and left Canada for the United States.

They started their journey south to Michigan and stayed with family until November. Then they rented a 20-foot truck, hitched their car to the back, and made their way to their next stop – Texas.

“I had never driven a truck in my life, so it was for four days on the road and I was really kind of freaking out,” she recalled. “I kind of went into a downward spiral, but I said, ‘We got to get there.” 

Tina was heading home, but said it would be a fresh start for her 18-year-old daughter. Nearly two years after they moved, the mother now fears her daughter, who was born and raised in Canada, will be deported. 

“If they should deport her, I will go with her because I’m not going to let her do this on her own,” Tina said anxiously. KXAN is not using Tina’s full name and not naming her daughter because they’re concerned their case could be impacted for speaking out.  

Tina said since her daughter’s birth, she had tried to get her U.S. citizenship. The family needed to sign the Consular Report of Birth Abroad form, which gives U.S. citizenship to a child born outside the country to a parent who is a U.S. citizen. Both parents must sign it before the child’s 18th birthday. Tina said her now-former husband refused to sign the form, so she could never start the process for her daughter.  

Instead, before they moved to the U.S., Tina submitted USCIS form I-130, a petition for a non-citizen relative. Their application was approved in June 2024 and sent to the National Visitor Center.

The process is long, she said, but also expensive: it has cost her over $2,000 since they began the legal path for her daughter’s citizenship, including submitting fingerprints and undergoing a physical examination and bloodwork.

Tina said since President Donald Trump took office again, communication from United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, has slowed down. She said most of the communication has been through an automated phone call system, and she explained the process is taking longer than anticipated. 

“If there was one person – an actual person I could talk to on the phone and say, ‘hey, we did all these things, what am I missing?’ Then I could get on to it and get it done,” Tina said. “But there’s nobody to talk to, so you keep on sending in forms and you keep on paying them and you don’t know if that’s actually a form you need, but you’re still giving the government money and you don’t know if it’s helping you or not.”

She explained they are facing other hurdles. She said her daughter has no form of U.S. identification, keeping her from driving and working, and she has no Social Security number, leaving her without access to Tina’s health insurance.

For now, all Tina and her daughter can do is wait.

“I thought, me being American, that I would be able to, you know, do the usual, follow the path, do all the things I need to do. And it would just happen,” Tina said. “But it doesn’t happen — there’s a lot of little things in between you got to do.”

From January to the end of September 2024, the USCIS public database reported more than 981,000 applications of the form Tina filled out. While nearly 712,000 applications were approved last year, over 2.2 million cases are pending due to a backlog. Tina’s is one of those.

Managing Attorney of the Texas Immigration Law Council Robert Painter said there are many reasons someone could not get citizenship, and it gets complicated based on the individual case.

The path to citizenship

Painter explained there are different paths to citizenship, mostly broken up into three categories: employment, family and humanitarian. 

Both the employment and family routes start with someone undocumented applying for their lawful permanent resident card, more commonly known as a green card. But there are several different ways to obtain one. 

The most common way is through the family route, which is when a U.S. citizen family member sponsors a person by filing the form on the non-citizen’s behalf. Family includes a relative who is 21 or older, or a fiancé who is a U.S. citizen. A U.S. employer can also sponsor someone. 

The humanitarian route is for people who enter the country through the asylum-seeking process by applying through form I-589 and demonstrating a fear of persecution in their home country.

After a year, asylees or refugees can apply for a green card.

Once someone has a green card, that person can apply for naturalization to become a U.S. citizen. 

“There’s so many steps that make it hard for people. I think one of the biggest problems we have is such an incredible backlog in the immigration system with the courts and the asylum process,” said Rebecca Lightsey, co-director of American Gateways.

The organization provides legal counsel, educational resources and advocacy for low-income immigrants and asylum seekers from San Antonio to Waco. 

Lightsey added that once a person applies for asylum, they should receive an interview within six months to a year. Right now, she said, because of the immigration courts' backlog, she sees people wait for years for their asylum interviews.

“Many of our new arrivals are seeking asylum, and to qualify for asylum, you have to meet very, very specific categories [like] fear of persecution in their home country,” Lightsey said. “Citizenship is kind of at the other end — so people who have been in this country for a long time. Once you get your green card after a certain period, then you can become a citizen.”

After President Trump initiated his plans for mass deportations in early January, Lightsey said many people have come forward asking for legal assistance, especially those still with pending applications.

“We are just completely overwhelmed. It’s really heartbreaking. What we are seeing is such a fear and anxiety in the immigrant community, and we can’t tell them that they shouldn’t be scared,” Lightsey said. 

Painter also mentioned the increase in expedited removals with the new presidential administration. 

According to the American Immigration Council, expedited removals allow immigration officers to remove noncitizens who come to the country at a port of entry and present documents that are either fraudulent or misrepresentative, or lack the documents needed to enter the country.

Any noncitizen who has lived in the U.S. for two years and did not check in with officials when immigrating to the U.S. can also face expedited removal.

“Expedited removals as a mechanism have existed since the ‘90s, but one of the things that we’ve seen under the Trump administration is they’ve expanded its use to the maximum limits allowed by law,” Painter said. 

He said ICE detention can be temporary until it proceeds with an expedited removal, which means for certain individuals in the country for less than two years, ICE is authorized to try to deport them without any judicial review of that deportation. 

Knowing your rights & outreach resources

Painter said that, for years, the organization has worked statewide, serving as a resource hub to support organizations and other nonprofits working in the immigration space and supplying them with educational materials for legal support. 

However, with all the recent changes and developments to immigration, Painter said the organization is focusing more on outreach to small immigration service providers to help provide more services to more people.

 “We certainly have really robust coalitions and community partners in places like Houston, Central Texas or San Antonio. But one of our core tenets of our mission is to provide services in underserved communities,” Painter said. “So a lot of our emphasis has been down in Laredo, or out in the panhandle, where there aren’t a lot of service providers.”

Painter said they have seen more demand from schools and churches requesting resource information to make sure everyone in their local communities is aware of their rights. 

“One of the things we really want to emphasize is that these resources are for everyone, because the constitutional rights apply not just to the undocumented community, but to U.S. citizens and permanent residents and anyone in this country. It’s useful information to have, even if they were born here,” Painter said. 

The Texas Immigration Law Council offers resources for those working in immigration by providing public fact sheets and immigration data on its website to help educate people about immigration rights and what many of the new executive orders mean.

American Gateways offers similar support. The organization hosts legal clinics in San Antonio and Austin twice a year, where volunteer lawyers help immigrants apply for citizenship and other legal pathways.

“Someone might want to give someone else the power of attorney over their financial affairs, they may want to do a care in custody agreement, so that if something happens to them and they have children, that their children are taken care of, to really plan ahead,” Lightsey said.

Tina and her daughter plan to attempt to get all of the checklist items they need before their interview appointment with immigration officials.

“We do everything and then wait another how many months,” Tina said. “Because we don’t know.”

If someone is in immigration detention, people can locate them on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Online Detainee Locator Portal.

KXAN Investigative Reporter Arezow Doost, Graphic Artist Wendy Gonzalez, Director of Investigations & Innovation Josh Hinkle, Investigative Photojournalist Chris Nelson, Digital Special Projects Developer Robert Sims and Digital Director Kate Winkle contributed to this report.