Tony Wasilewski

I was born and raised in small town Monki in Poland, near Warsaw. I came to the United States in 1989 on a tourist visa. I overstayed my visa and was undocumented for some time.

In 1993, I met and married Janina, who came to the USA in 1989, a few months after my arrival. We started to build our lives together. After four years, we bought a house in Chicago’s suburbs and opened a small business.

When Janina and I settled and started to feel at home in the US, we started to be active members of our community.

In 2001, the child we hoped and dreamed about for so long, Brian, was born. Since then, he has been the center of our family. In 2002, my work sponsored me so I could receive a green card. Consequently, a few months from now, I will become a US citizen. Since the beginning, my family was in “trouble.” In 1989, before we met, Janina, applied for political asylum based on her active membership in the solidarity movement during the Communism regime in Poland, but she was denied the asylum in 1994 – after our marriage and after we started to build our lives in the US.

However for many years, we struggled with immigration courts and immigration laws trying to keep our family together, but we lost the fight with the system after many years of struggle when Janina received the deportation order, which could not be stopped. We have exhausted every possible way for appealing to immigration courts.

June 8th, my wife left the United States with our son. We have decided that it will be the best for Brian to be with his mother. Now, our family is divided by the immigration bureaucracy. We have decided that I should stay here, in Chicago, to keep our business running – our only source of income. I also need to wait here until I become a US citizen.

I am going to Washington to tell my family’s story – to show people that a family who was always trying to live according to the law, a family that could be a great benefit to this country, is destroyed by the immigration rules and regulations. I want the people of this country to understand that the immigration law needs to be changed and it has to happen now.

There cannot be anymore divided families; there cannot be anymore children whose mothers or fathers live in another country because the U.S. law does not look at a person, but instead sees only papers and documents.

My wife and son call me from Poland now. Brian asks me all the time when he can come back home. How can I tell him that he can come back but his mom cannot?