An Opportunity For A New Life Marred by Loss
An Opportunity Marred by Loss – Families Separated by Immigration from Jose Bayona on Vimeo.
Sherin Inniss’ family was broken apart by the stress of the U.S. immigration process. Her husband, Vernon Inniss, died from a stress-related brain aneurism in 2008. Doctors told her it was stress-related. She is convinced the stress came from her husband’s efforts to keep his family in New York despite broken promises from the New York City Department of Education.
Vernon was recruited in 2003 by the New York City Department of Education to help alleviate a teacher shortage in the city. DOE promised Vernon, who was a professor at the Georgetown University in Guyana, a teaching job in a city public school.
DOE said that if Vernon took the job the city would sponsor him and his family for permanent resident status and eventual citizenship. Vernon was one of more than 500 teachers hired the DOE from various Caribbean nations from 2001 to 2003 when the economy was better and the city needed more teachers.
“But the DOE never fulfilled that promise,” Sherin said. To sponsor Vernon and his family for permanent status, the DOE first had to give Vernon a teaching contract. Sherin says Vernon never got that contract, but the DOE put him to work as a teacher anyway. Instead, Sherin says, DOE sponsored him for a three-year working that he renewed in 2006, The visa allowed the whole family to stay in the country legally until 2009.
[Several calls made to the NYC Department of Education for comment about this case were not return].
The working visa could not be renewed a second time, so by 2008, a year before it was scheduled to expire and the family would had to leave the country or risk deportation. Vernon became increasingly worried and agitated that the DOE still would not give him the promised contract, which would in turn pave the way to permanent residency.
In 2008, after five years in New York City and still no contract from the DOE, Sherin remembers Vernon was worried about the family’s immigration status. The threat of having to move back to Guyana the next following year loomed over the family.
On the evening of April 19, 2008 the family was relaxing in their three-bedroom apartment in Jamaica, Queens. Their two sons, Emmanuel and Samuel, were playing computer games. Vernon started to complain of a headache and then started to vomit. Sherin called an ambulance but by the time that the ambulance arrived her husband was lying on the floor with his eyes staring into space.
“My sons were very destroyed. Their dad, their hero, just laying there on the floor, there was nothing they could do,” she said.
Her husband was taken to the hospital and put on life support, but it wasn’t enough. A brain scan showed massive bleeding and he died the next day from a brain aneurism.
After her husband’s death, Sherin received a phone call from Helen Conrad, a lawyer assigned by the DOE to oversee the immigration process for the Caribbean teachers. Conrad informed Sherin that because Vernon died their family would not be able to get sponsorship to stay in the U.S. “When your husband died, your status died with him,” Sherin said Conrad told her.
In 2009, Sherin was able to get a working visa after starting to work as tutor at Touro College in Queens. Her visa will expire next February, when she will have to move back to Guyana with her two sons.
Sherin says she is fully capable of taking the teaching position that the DOE was going to give to her husband. If she gets the contract – amid the DEO’s current plans to lay off more than 6,000 city teachers – then the Innis family can apply for the permanent status that the DOE promised them nearly eight years ago.
“We came here as a family, and he died. He’s buried here,” Sherin said. “At least give them the opportunity to visit his burial place.”
