This is a tale of not just a broken immigration system but also a system that treats its own citizens differently from each other and, even worse, treats those who enter illegally better than those who follow the rules. It’s an appalling example of the meanness of a faceless, corrupt bureaucracy run by automatons unable to use reason and logic.

After 26 years of living in Australia, first as an Air Force officer and then as a civilian contractor for the DOD, Dave Ives and his family decided in 2022 to leave Australia and return to the U.S.

Australia had slid into an authoritarian state during COVID, and they were looking forward to returning to Florida, where they owned property and could live in relative freedom.

Dave’s wife, Marieta, is a former U.S. permanent resident. Her green card expired in 2003 because her husband Dave stayed in Australia too long working for a U.S. defense contractor. The green card is renewed annually and generally requires U.S. residence. This is a big part of the problem: to renew it, you should be living in the U.S. If you don’t live in the U.S., then the government says, “You don’t need a green card,” and they can take it away.

Since she only needed a tourist visa to return to the U.S. for short visits, Dave and Marieta did not renew her green card. They assumed that when the time came to return to the U.S. permanently, it would be easy to get it renewed. After all, they have filed more than 30 years of U.S. federal tax returns together as a married couple, own properties in the U.S., have U.S.-born children, and Dave is a veteran.

Dave and Marieta Ives and their children.

In March 2022, they filed for a new green card so that Marieta could legally return to the United States. They were told it would take 11-17 months for it to be approved. Their adult children left earlier that month to get settled while Dave and Marieta waited.

It has now been almost three years, and Marieta is still denied permanent entry.

One bureaucratic SNAFU after another has prevented her from getting legal permission for permanent residency. And no one seems to be able to break through the bureaucratic tape, not even Dave’s U.S. congressman in Florida. All communication has been through the bureaucratic wall of logging into the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) or National Visa Center (NVC) website and uploading documents.

It took more than a year for USCIS to “approve” their application (March 23, 2023). Then the USCIS handed them off to the NVC for further red-tape processing, including police clearances from every place Marieta has lived (Philippines, Australia, the U.K., and Mexico), and uploading many of the documents they had already uploaded to USCIS (e.g., marriage and birth certificates).

It took almost another year to finally get the NVC to approve their documents and schedule the interview appointment with the U.S. Consulate in Sydney—approved on January 10, 2024, via email.

The latest obstacle is that Marieta did not get a COVID-19 shot. If her “vax waiver” is denied, that could spell the end of the process and denial of permanent entry. U.S. immigration requires a laundry list of vaccines, including the COVID shot. Their daughters, as American citizens, entered without having this requirement.

The waiver application is a catch-all and includes “grounds of inadmissibility” items such as communicable disease, mental disorder, involvement in crime, controlled substance violation, convicted of two or more offenses, coming to the U.S. to engage in prostitution, procure or import prostitutes, serious criminal activity and alien smuggling.

The irony shouldn’t be lost on anyone. Our government is obstructing the efforts of the wife of a U.S. veteran and previous green card holder to legally enter by requiring her to get proof of no criminal record in every place she’s ever lived. Meanwhile, thousands of known terrorists and criminals have crossed the border in just the last three years. And then, the government requires further documentation on vaccines that illegals don’t have either.

The waiver application is 12 pages long and calls out “lawyer” in a booming voice. Mere mortals cannot navigate this red-tape labyrinth. So Dave and Marieta have hired a lawyer in California.

The people in charge of making these decisions have tremendous latitude in making judgment calls. Hence, Dave and Marieta thought once they got a set of eyeballs on their case, they would be in. But no. Instead, they have been told that it could be another 28 months to get her vax waiver approved. If so, it means nearly five years for Marieta to gain legal entry. That’s if the government doesn’t deny it, which is a distinct possibility.

At about the same time that Dave and Marieta filed their initial application, Britney Griner was arrested in Russia on drug charges. Within ten months, Griner was back home after the U.S. government worked out her release in a prisoner exchange.

If Marieta had only been a basketball star, perhaps she would have been considered important enough, as the wife of a U.S. citizen, to also be allowed to return to the U.S. quickly.

Or if Marieta had used the CBP1 app for a scheduled entry, it would have been only weeks until she reunited with her daughters in Florida.

And unfortunately, she wasn’t selected for a free ride on a chartered plane to the city of her choice by the Biden administration. Nor did she simply cross illegally.

Marieta and Dave didn’t do any of that. They played by the rules, only to be ignored by a bureaucracy in which no one is accountable for anything.

For whom is the government working?

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Jeanne Ives is the CEO of Breakthrough Ideas and Radioshow Host of The Real Story w/Jeanne Ives on AM 560 Chicago. For more details about Dave and Marieta’s green card fiasco, read chapter 10 of Dave’s latest book, ‘Lockdown Australia: Pandemic of Madness’