Making Safety and Stability a Reality for Edgar

Edgar was 8 years old when he went to work in the fields, cutting coffee and growing beans and corn in his small Honduran village. Each day he would rise at 5:30am and walk a half-hour with his mother to labor in the hot sun, and he was always very dirty when they came home, he says.

Edgar’s father disappeared when he was 3, and left his mother to care for him and his four siblings. Edgar's mother worked hard as a farm laborer, but there was never enough to eat at home. She wanted them to go to school, too, but the fees were expensive. “I was very interested in learning more about computers and technology, but our school only had a few computers, which rarely worked, and we had no internet access."

When he was 12, Edgar had to leave school for good so that he could work more and help support his younger siblings. He continued to study on weekends but was never able to scrape together the tuition money to attend high school.

“I wanted to go to university so that I could have a good, professional job and do something important,” he says, “not just work in the fields for my whole life.”

With the help of a De Novo attorney, Edgar was able to obtain special findings in Probate and Family Court that he had been abandoned by his father, making him eligible for Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) Status. SIJS offers a path to permanent residence in the U.S. for young people who have been abandoned, abused, or neglected by one or both parents. Then, Edgar worked with an immigration attorney at De Novo to file an SIJS petition.

Waiting for a decision was not easy for Edgar. His SIJS petition was among tens of thousands caught in a years-long backlog at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). As the years passed, Edgar finished high school and, under a new deferred action program, received his work authorization and started working at a restaurant. In early December, after more than 4 years of waiting, he finally received a decision — Edgar was granted his green card.