Late last year, Dustin Hoffman and his wife Gloria started the paperwork to secure a visa for her to live in the U.S.The couple, along with their 5-year-old daughter Chaya and Hoffman's 12-year-old step son Israel, lived together in Argentina, where Hoffman had moved in 2013 after doing a deployment with the U.S.Army in Iraq."My daughter is growing up and she's very smart and my stepson he's very smart," Hoffman said.
"But the resources in Argentina for an autistic child and the school system in Argentina … I don't know.I just feel like I needed to give my daughter the same opportunities that I had growing up."But nearly a year later, the kids and Gloria are stuck in Argentina in bureaucratic limbo due to continuing delays in the processing of their visa.That's because this January the Trump administration banned the processing of immigrant visas for citizens of 75 countries.
Many of the migrants were already in the process of getting a visa.Some already had the visa approved; they were just waiting to get the physical visa delivered to them.Hoffman's wife is from Colombia, one of the countries on the list.A federal judge this August ordered the ban to be lifted, but Hoffman's family still has not gotten their visa, and the State Department continues to ask them to provide additional evidence to prove they have the financial means to live in the U.S.
without becoming a public charge.Attorneys representing migrants say the Hoffman family's case is emblematic of a wider problem: They say the Trump administration is not complying with the federal court order and is instead slow-walking the processing of the visas."So while technically the ban doesn't exist, it doesn't matter practically if people are still not being able to get their green card interviews or have their interviews not be finished and not get their immigrant visa stamps foils and be able to come into the United States," said Alexis Axelrad, the president elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Ass...