Hey everyone, I hope my situation doesn’t seem too absurd and hopefully there will be some good souls willing to help me out. Normally I would have never thought of asking for money like that as I am used to always being able to provide for my family and up until June 4th of this year my life took a turn for the worse. So let me begin and I will try to be as detailed as posible so you guys could see where I am coming from. I live in a border town in Mexico right accross from Calexico, CA. My occupation is driving semi trucks for a living. Being that I live in a border town I was able to work moving loads accross the border for the company I was working for, to the US and back. Halfway through 2022 the recession hit the trucking industry hard and people started getting layed off left and right, however I kept my job but everything slowed down, meaning I wasn’t able to generate much because I was payed by movements. Around late February of 2023 it got so bad that I had to start looking elsewhere because nobody in my city was hiring and bills weren’t waiting. I found a company in Juarez (accross the border from El Paso, TX) that was giving my an opportunity to work for them as a driver, again taking loads to the US and back. So I had to leave my family behind to be able to provide for them and pay expenses. After a few weeks passed I noticed some things were off or fishy with this company that hired me so I decided I didn’t want to stay with them. During my search I found a company from Texas that was willing to give me a job and not only that, but also made an offer that a lot of people that are in this type of situation could not turn down. The offer was that they were willing to petition a work permit that would allow me to live and work legally in the US and my family would also be able to go with me. Being that I am not a US citizen and I was, up until that point, working for border crossing companies with a visa (which is legal), it was an offer that could change my family’s life. I mean we are all looking for an opportunity like that to be able to have a great life living and working in the US. So I said I was willing to take that offer but I had to prove that I knew how to work and would be a good employee. So basically I had to work to prove myself and after maybe a couple of months they would start the petition process if everything turned out good. Long story short I spent all of May working for them (technically illegaly because I wanted to prove my work ethic first to be given a chance for residency in the US). I had not seen my family since I left to Juarez and it had been around 3 months, that was the longest I had been away from them. After about a month of working with them I went back home to my family for a week thinking everything seems to be going fine and soon we might be living a new life in the US. After the week of being home had passed I tried to go back to Texas to keep shooting for that great opportunity I had been waiting for and at the border when I tried to cross with my visa I was detained and questioned. Long story short my visa was revoked on June 4th of 2023 for the fact that I was illegaly working in the US and as much as I tried explaining to the border patrol officer that the company was going to petition a work permit for me after they saw I was a good element, they still took away my visa. The following 2 weeks I fell into depression because the visa was what allowed me to make decent money as a truck driver taking loads to the US and back to Mexico. I don’t know if I was being lied to or being used by that company just to work for them and at the end they probably were not even going to go through with the petition. If I had know that it would turn out the way it did I would have done things much different and I would still have my visa. If that wasn’t sad enough, once I notified the company that I was no longer able to go back to prove that I deserved the opportunity, they ignored my messages at first, until a couple of days later they acted surprised and in other words said “that sucks” and never heard form them again, not even an apology or an “is there anything we can do to help since we got you into this?”
So now I am back in my hometown in Mexico strugging to pay debt and barely being able to cover my home and school expenses. I consider myself mentally tough since I have been through a lot in my life but this really impacted me in ways that you could not imagine and I often find myself getting emotional and fighting myself to keep from crying. I try not to show my wife and kids how this is affecting me deep inside. So I am here hoping I could receive some help, I know there are great people out there willing to lend out a helping hand.
Any help would be appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to read my story.
paypal.me/AlbinBernardino