David Wyatt is pacing the living room, sobbing into the phone, begging congressmen for help.
At any moment, his wife, Sonia Belouniss – a Durango resident and French citizen who works as a nurse at Four Corners Health Care – might be deported.
In perfect English, Belouniss tells Wyatt, “David, you have to stop worrying. Or we’ll fall apart.”
She is crying, too.
After missing a visa deadline by 22 days and a brush with the law in 2014, Belouniss’ illegal status has transformed the couple’s dream of making a life together in America into a bureaucratic nightmare dominated by a prison stay, fear and spurned pleas for mercy from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
At a time when the Obama Administration has directed the Department of Homeland Security to focus on deporting “felons, not families,” Belouniss’ plight also raises pressing questions about immigrants’ rights to due process in a country where a couple’s entire happiness, solvency, mental health and future residence comes down to a bureaucrat’s signature in Denver.
Belouniss met Wyatt 20 years ago, when she was a French teenage skiing prodigy on the U.S. Pro Ski Tour competing in slalom and giant slalom.
At 27, she retired, and then became a nurse. For years, the couple moved around Europe together, before Belouniss finally followed Wyatt to Durango in 2013, through the visa-waiver program. Before her 90 days were up, in December 2013, the couple impulsively married in the La Plata County Clerk & Recorder’s Office.
“Finally, I asked her because I’ve been in love with her for two decades,” Wyatt said.
Contrary to popular belief, immigrants who marry U.S. citizens don’t automatically become U.S. citizens. Instead, to gain citizenship, they must go through a long application process.
A lawyer told the newlyweds that Belouniss should apply for permanent residency. They started the paperwork.
Then, on Jan. 8, 2014, the couple fought, and Durango police went to their house.
“She’s French – so, you know, she was going la la la,” said Wyatt, dismissing their raised voices as arising from a Gallic tendency to be animated when arguing with a lover.
Police arrested Belouniss for harassment and domestic violence. They also took her fingerprints.
Then their ordeal began: Belouniss had overstayed her visa by 22 days. Though the 6th Judicial District Attorney’s Office dismissed all charges against Belouniss the next day, law enforcement held her in La Plata County jail for two days until authorities transferred her to Colorado Springs, where she spent more than a week in a prison populated by felons, before she landed in the ICE detention facility in Aurora.
“Prison was terrifying. It was just awful. I mean, these people were criminals,” Belouniss said.
In all, she spent almost a month incarcerated before the Department of Homeland Security stayed her deportation for a year on Feb. 4, 2014.
“It’s outrageous,” said Jessica Kunevicius, the couple’s Denver-based immigration lawyer. “Everyone is quick to call undocumented immigrants criminals. But Sonia spent a month in prison even though the cops dropped all charges. Sonia has no criminal history – anywhere in the world. She’s a highly educated nurse. Now, Homeland Security and ICE are deporting French ski stars who are married to U.S. citizens?”
After Belouniss was released, the couple applied to renew the stay of deportation in early February before the one in place lapsed.
However, ICE denied the request Feb. 24. In a ruling, ICE official Jeffrey Lynch wrote that ICE, in “its unreviewable discretion,” had determined that Belouniss “falls within one or more of DHS’s enforcement priorities as established by DHS Secretary (Jeh) Johnson on Nov. 20, 2014: to wit, Priority 2d; Mrs Belouniss has abused the visa-waiver program.”
The ruling concludes: “You may not file an appeal or motion to reopen/reconsider this decision.”
A White House spokesman did not respond to questions about whether Belouniss is a priority under the Obama administration’s new guidelines for deportation.
Kunevicius urged ICE to revisit the decision.
“One 22-day overstay counts as ‘significant abuse?’” she said.
Asked what constitutes “significant abuse” of the visa-waiver program, ICE Spokesman Carl Rusnok said, “All I can tell you is, from my understanding of the VWP, you have 90 days. After that 90 days, you’ve abused the program.”
He said he couldn’t “discuss the legal aspects” of Belouniss’ case. Asked whether he could put The Durango Herald in touch with an ICE official who could, Rusnok said: “All I can tell you is the people who are qualified to do that have already done that. They have already reviewed the case and determined, based on the available evidence, that this does not qualify for any sort of denial of deportation.”
By the time ICE denied Belouniss’ request to renew the stay of deportation, the old stay had expired.
“My lawyer told me they could come for me that day. What do you do?” she said, crying. “You pack.”
And live in fear.
For the last two weeks, Belouniss and Wyatt have tried to hold it together. Yet, Wyatt’s health has nose-dived. When he read ICE’s ruling refusing the stay, Wyatt became so afraid that they would seize Belouniss that he listed the couple’s belongings on Craigslist at fire-sale prices last week.
“We’ve just paid, and paid, and paid,” he said.
Meanwhile, Belouniss has stopped eating, stopped sleeping.
“I have no rights,” she said. “I learned that when I was in jail. I asked to see a judge, but they said, ‘No. This is up to ICE.’ I pay U.S. taxes. When I got married, I thought: Hey, I’ll be a U.S. citizen, like everybody else.
“I understand that immigration is an issue in America. But they don’t tell you when you come in on a visa-waiver program that you have no rights.”
Last week, ICE said it might revisit its decision if the couple could supply proof that their relocating to France “is not possible and not merely inconvenient” and prove that Belouniss – who traveled legally throughout the United States for years as a ski star – has never before overstayed a visa.
Belouniss, who is living out of a bag right now in their Durango home, said she is petrified about the future.
She can’t apply to become a U.S. citizen so long as ICE views her as a visa-waiver program violator.
“David speaks two words of French, and his diplomas aren’t recognized there. If we went back to France, his life would be over. I just want to stay with my husband,” she said.
Last week, Wyatt briefly held a trembling Belouniss before she left for work.
One possession leaned against their barren living room wall, like the shard of a broken promise: a poster of the Eiffel Tower.
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that police dropped all charges against Belouniss in February 2014. The 6th Judicial District Attorney’s Office dropped the charges, not the police.
