‘How many days?’: One nine-year-old girl's years-long wait for permanent residency and a visit home to the Philippines

Nine-year-old Khloe Tag-At sits at her dining room table in her Pembroke home, drawing in her sketchbook a depiction of Mount Apo in the Philippines.

Nine-year-old Khloe Tag-At sits at her dining room table in her Pembroke home, drawing in her sketchbook a depiction of Mount Apo in the Philippines. GEOFF FORESTER / Monitor staff

Nine-year-old Khloe Tag-At sits at her dining room table in her Pembroke home, drawing in her sketchbook a depiction of Mount Apo in the Philippines.

Nine-year-old Khloe Tag-At sits at her dining room table in her Pembroke home, drawing in her sketchbook a depiction of Mount Apo in the Philippines. GEOFF FORESTER—Monitor staff

Nine-year-old Khloe Tag-At sits at her dining room table in her Pembroke home, drawing in her sketchbook a depiction of Mount Apo in the Philippines.

Nine-year-old Khloe Tag-At sits at her dining room table in her Pembroke home, drawing in her sketchbook a depiction of Mount Apo in the Philippines. GEOFF FORESTER—Monitor staff

Nine-year-old Khloe Tag-At sits at her dining room table in her Pembroke home, drawing in her sketchbook a depiction of Mount Apo in the Philippines.

Nine-year-old Khloe Tag-At sits at her dining room table in her Pembroke home, drawing in her sketchbook a depiction of Mount Apo in the Philippines. GEOFF FORESTER / Monitor staff

By RACHEL WACHMAN

Monitor staff

Published: 01-02-2025 3:25 PM

Modified: 01-02-2025 5:44 PM


Nine-year-old Khloe Tag-At sat at her dining room table, hunched over her sketchbook with a colored pencil in hand.

“It’s Mount Apo,” Khloe said without glancing up. “The tallest mountain in the Philippines.”

She smiled at the thought and continued to trace the peak onto the page, having committed the image to memory after years of staring at it on a computer screen. She’s learning about mountains in her fourth-grade class at school and talks about this particular one every chance she gets.

Khloe hasn’t been back to her home country in three years. She and her mother, Jamella, immigrated to the U.S. in 2022, but due to difficulties navigating immigration paperwork, long processing times, and frustrating delays, Khloe still has yet to receive federal documents proving her permanent residency, commonly called a green card. If she leaves the country without it, she won’t be allowed back in, her parents fear. Jamella received her permanent residency almost two years ago.

“How many days until my green card comes?” Khloe asks her mom and her stepfather, Dave Kingston, every few days.

Their common answers are, “We don’t know,” and “Hopefully soon.”

Khloe hopes to go to the Philippines to visit her grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles, all of whom she has not seen since she was six. Approaching her tenth birthday in February, the fourth-grader wants nothing more than her green card as a present.

A multi-year process

Jamella met Kingston in 2019 in the Philippines where she grew up. The two fell in love and decided to forge a life together, undertaking the long process of obtaining visas to bring Jamella and her young daughter to live in New Hampshire.

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The decision to move across the world did not come easily to Jamella, who knew she and her daughter would be leaving behind the only place they’d ever called home. But the desire to build a family with Kingston – and Khloe’s dream of seeing snow – led the mother and daughter to embrace the adventure of relocating to the United States.

The pandemic struck right as Jamella and Khloe were about to begin the immigration process, with the American embassy in the Philippines shutting its doors the day of Jamella’s visa interview. Back home in Pembroke, Kingston waited. Two years would pass before they could begin their new life together, but their patience paid off. After countless Facetime calls with Kingston, Khloe and Jamella arrived here in January 2022.

“At first, going here, she was really excited, and then the first two weeks she was just crying because she missed her cousins so much,” Jamella said of Khloe.

Both mother and daughter struggled to adjust to life in New Hampshire, from bundling up to go outside in subzero cold, to not being able to find familiar ingredients to cook with, and missing their family back in the Philippines.

Jamella came to the U.S. on a K-1 visa, which meant she and Kingston needed to get married within the first 90 days of her arrival. Khloe, as Jamella’s dependent, came on a K-2 visa. Following Dave and Jamella’s marriage in April 2022, they began the process of applying for permanent residency but hit some snags along the way. The family submitted one application for Jamella and Khloe combined, believing the process to be similar to that of obtaining a K1 and K2 visa for mother and child.

After Kingston received partial reimbursement for the check he had attached to the green card application for Jamella and Khloe, he decided something might be amiss.

“I thought, ‘Okay, so it must have cost less.’ And then Jamella gets approved for her permanent residency about a year after it was applied for,” Kingston said. “And then we’re wondering, ‘What’s going on with Khloe’s?’”

The couple realized that the process of obtaining permanent residency differed from the K1/K2 visa process and Khloe needed a separate application. They submitted her paperwork in May 2023, several months after Jamella had already received her green card.

“Nobody really explained, ‘Oh, you need to send in a new application.’ They don’t care,” Kingston said.

Twenty months later, the family is still waiting for Khloe’s permanent residency to come through.

The waiting game

Without her green card, Khloe cannot visit her family back home. She also cannot be claimed as a dependent by Kingston, since she does not yet have a social security number.

“I’m just feeling sad, like when’s it going to come? Is it going to come next week or next month? I don’t know, maybe next year,” Khloe said.

After submitting Khloe’s green card application, the family watched the estimated processing time of her application slowly decrease, until it went down to two weeks. But when Kingston checked again at the start of December, over a year and half after sending in the paperwork, the estimated wait time had jumped back up to 10 months.

“This feels like it’s falling through the cracks,” Kingston said. “How many years is she going to be here before somebody finally figures out there’s an application out there? For how much time is she going to be stuck in the United States and not be able to visit her family?”

When Kingston told his family about the extended wait time, silence filled the room. Khloe stared down at her lap.

“It makes me mad, having to wait so so long, just to go home,” she said after a moment. Jamella placed a hand on her daughter’s shoulder.

“It’s painful. It’s heartbreaking,” Jamella said, looking at Khloe. “It said two weeks and then suddenly it said 10 months. What’s going on? How come it’s like that?”

About 80 percent of family-based residency applications processed in New Hampshire are settled within 13 months, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Khloe’s application, submitted May 2023, has exceeded that estimate by more than half a year. 

Immigration lawyer Ron Abramson, who practices at Shaheen & Gordon, described the immigration system as “hypertechnical” and “esoteric,” creating a process that is “not user-friendly.” He said mistakes in applications can lead to significant consequences or, at the very least, cause immense delays.

“The problem with the bureaucracy is that this is all paperwork, but it’s people,” said Abramson, who was speaking generally and does not represent the family. “These are people’s lives and people’s interests, the ability of people to travel.”

Ongoing staffing shortages at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services also contribute to long processing times for applications such as Khloe’s.

Separated by an ocean

Once Jamella’s green card came through, she flew back to her hometown of Laguna to visit her parents. But returning home without her daughter cast a shadow over Jamella’s reunion with her family, who she had not seen in a year and a half.

“What hurt the most is the first thing they all asked is, ‘Where is Khloe?’” Jamella said. “The second time that I go home, they thought that Khloe would be there, because I surprised them again, and they thought that Khloe was going to be finally there, but she was not. My mom and my dad and my siblings, they’re close with her.”

Jamella’s 86-year-old grandmother keeps saying she hopes to see Khloe again before it’s too late. Jamella already had an uncle die in the time since she and Khloe came to New Hampshire. 

Khloe grew sad both times her mom was back in the Philippines. So Jamella hatched a plan: if Khloe couldn’t visit her relatives back home, perhaps they could surprise Khloe in the United States. But after paying $200 for a visa interview, Jamella’s mother was denied a tourist visa.

“My mom doesn’t have a criminal record or anything,” Jamella said.

Her brother and sister each applied for tourist visas and paid for an interview, but like their mother, they were denied too.

“They just wanted – we just wanted – to surprise Khloe,” said Jamella, blinking back tears. “If Khloe cannot go there, why not bring my family and see her, just at least for two weeks just to be with Khloe in that time? And my mom said that to the interviewer, that she wants to be with Khloe for her birthday, and they denied her anyway.”

Thinking about how much her family wants to see her brings Khloe comfort, even with thousands of miles of separation. She still hopes her permanent residency will come in time for her birthday in February.

The family's situation isn't as rare as people may think.

“There are so many circumstances in the process of immigrating to the U.S. or petitioning for a family member where there are extremely long periods of family separation,” said immigration lawyer Emily White of Orr & Reno. “This story is common both in long periods where people end up in the U.S. unable to leave and reunite with family members and long periods of time where family members are abroad unable to unite with people in the U.S. who are relatives and have immigration status.”

Tighter regulations around immigration could lead to longer processing times.

“I’m concerned about the coming administration in that it’s already so difficult to communicate with immigration, but there are channels available and open,” said White, who does not represent the family. “I suspect in the coming administration that a lot of those channels will disappear or become even narrower. If there’s a problem, if there’s no way to communicate with immigration, then there’s no clear way to resolve it. It results in additional applications being submitted and further backlog in the system.”

Between two homes

Khloe finds herself torn between two places. She’s grown to love her life in Pembroke and the friendships she’s built. But some days, missing the Philippines overcomes her. 

“I just want to go. I don’t even care if I can’t come back,” she'll say.

Recently, Khloe’s family received an immigration notice asking for updated vaccination information, which had been submitted over a year ago. The family hopes that submitting updated vaccination records means that Khloe’s permanent residency won’t be far behind. Still, their frustration at the immigration system and its long, complicated process remains the subject of many conversations in their home.

“We’re doing it all legally. My family, they’re doing it legally but cannot just come here. But then they’re letting people from the border come here without paperwork,” Jamella said. “It feels unfair. Like, why us? We’re paying like we’re supposed to, we’re doing it the right way, filling out all the paperwork, yet they’re denying us?”

While the wait time for Khloe’s green card increased to 10 months at the start of December, it’s now decreased to an estimated eight months. The family places little stock in the time frame given, for they know how quickly it can go up again. Still, they hope.

In the meantime, Khloe spends her time learning the clarinet, singing in a choir, practicing ju-jitzu and gymnastics, playing soccer and baseball, and baking with Jamella, who sells sweets at different markets in the area. Khloe seizes every chance she can to learn something new, be it at school while studying mountains like Mount Apo, on the field with her teammates, in the kitchen with her mom, or with her sketchbook and colored pencils.

When she grows up, Khloe dreams of becoming an artist or a pilot, she says, holding her drawing of Mount Apo close to her chest.

“So I can explore the world and go back to the Philippines,” she said with a smile.

Rachel Wachman can be reached at rwachman@cmonitor.com