In May 2005, Georgetown Ph.D student Waskar Ari (GRD ’04) went home to Bolivia expecting to return to the United States in the fall to take up a teaching position at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Now, over two years later, Ari has just returned to America after the Department of Homeland Security delayed his work visa and revoked his student visa, prompting Georgetown administrators and others from around the country to fight on his behalf.

Kenneth Winkle, chair of the history department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said he applied for the work visa for Ari and that UNL paid $1,000 for the visa to be expedited in the spring of 2005. Within days, the Department of State notified Winkle that Ari’s application had been referred to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, a division of the Department of Homeland Security.

“We were puzzled because we were never provided with an explanation,” Winkle said.

Ari had already leased a house in Lincoln and had moved his belongings to the house. His plan was to begin teaching at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the fall of 2005.

“The plan was to go back to Bolivia for 10 days to renew my visa, but I ended up having to stay there over two years,” Ari said. “It turned my world upside down.”

In July 2005, the U.S. Consulate in La Paz, Bolivia, invited Ari in for a meeting, to which he went expecting to receive his visa; instead, the vice consulate informed Ari that the Department of State had cancelled all of his past student visas.

In a letter to General Secretary of the American Association of University Professors Roger Bowen, Dale Rumbarger, a representative of the State Department, said that Ari’s student visa had been revoked “under the Immigration and Nationality Act” and that a “review of Department records was unable to locate a recent or pending visa application for Dr. Ari.”

Steve Royster, a State Department spokesperson, declined to comment on this specific case but said that every application is run through a database, and if something comes up, the department is required to do a security check.

“We don’t take into account an applicant’s political beliefs when considering a visa request,” Royster said.

Royster said that 97 percent of approved applicants are issued visas within two days. From October 2005 to September 2006, 74.6 percent of applications from the Western Hemisphere were approved by the State Department.

After learning of the hold placed on his visa, Ari decided to cancel the lease on the house in Lincoln and donate all of his belongings there – including clothes and furniture – to charity. To make money, he worked at a university in La Paz conducting research and teaching classes while performing other odd jobs on the side.

Over the past two years, Georgetown faculty members and University President John J. DeGoia wrote letters to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff asking them to grant Ari his visa. The American Historic Association and the American Civil Liberties Union also urged both departments to reconsider the hold. Georgetown alumni in Congress joined in, writing asking for Ari’s entry into the U.S.

“I learned I was a part of a larger family. Everyone was very supportive,” Ari said.

Among those supporters was Wayne Davis, chair of the philosophy department at Georgetown and president of the Faculty Senate, who said that when he learned of Ari’s case in 2005, he immediately began making phone calls and writing letters to various officials working on Ari’s case asking them to grant his visa request or explain why it was being held.

In March this year, UNL filed a writ of mandamus with a U.S. District Court, demanding the Department of Homeland Security to make a decision on Ari’s visa.

“I’d never imagined there’d be a lawsuit where [UNL] would be telling the Department of Homeland security to do its job and make a decision,” Davis said. “Why’d this man lose two years?”

The court responded this past spring by giving the Department of Homeland Security 60 days to make a decision. On the second-to-last day of this period, the Department of Homeland Security lifted the hold, and Ari received his visa within days.

“When he got in, I was delighted,” said Jo Ann Moran Cruz, chair of Georgetown’s history department while Ari was a student. “The academic community as a whole really stepped up to help him out.”

But when Ari finally stepped on U.S. soil on Aug. 20, USCIS in iami stopped him to make a second review of his visa.

“Even then I wondered, `Will they let me in even though I had a visa?'” Ari said.

After several hours of waiting, he was allowed to continue on to Nebraska, where he said he had two boxes of letters from the past two years waiting for him. He is living with a friend until he settles in.

“It’s like starting from zero,” he said.