What was supposed to be a weekend trip to Quebec back in March has turned into a month-long ordeal for one Canadian family now stranded in Ottawa.
Michael Freeze, his wife and their three children left Massachusetts for a skiing trip in Quebec, expecting to be back home a few days later. Instead, Freeze says he was denied re-entry into the United States while trying to renew his TN visa at the border.
Now, a month later, the family is staying at a house in Kanata while the owners are away on vacation, unable to return to their home in Martha’s Vineyard.
“My wife and kids are stranded here. We don’t really know how long anything’s going to take,” Freeze said. “We still have to pay for everything, even though we’re not living there”
Originally from Alberta, the Freeze family moved to Martha’s Vineyard four years ago after Michael Freeze graduated from university in Idaho and took a job with a luxury home builder.
“There’s a one-year visa right after you graduate, so I did that for the first year and then I got a TN visa,” he said.
That TN visa allowed Freeze to work in the United States where he and his family built their life, rent a home on the island and welcomed their youngest son Luca.
So, when they decided to take a weekend skiing trip, Freeze says he didn’t think twice about renewing his visa at a Quebec border crossing.
“We were at the border for a long time they were trying to figure things out and it got denied,” said Freeze. “Essentially he didn’t think that my job landed as a construction consultant.”
He says he tried again the next day at an Ontario border crossing with updated paperwork but was denied a second time.
“My gut just dropped,” said Cinthya. “I was just like, what do we do? Where do we go from here.”
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a TN visa allows Canadian citizens to work in the United States in certain professional occupations.
“You will see border officers sometimes exercise discretion in favour of these people,” said Jeremy Richards, immigration lawyer and partner at Richards and Jurusik. “That discretion, however, we’ve seen reduced under this administration where somebody has a borderline case, they’re less likely to get approved under this administration, where under past administrations, they might have been approved.”
For the Freeze family, that decision has left them in limbo, separated from their home, Freeze’s job and the life they built in Massachusetts, while they explore other options to return.
“The uncertainty is the hard part,” Freeze said. “But we feel called to be living in the U.S., raising our family on this really safe, really amazing island with this amazing community.”
“We never imagined that this would have happened when we were leaving for sure.”
CTV News reached out to American authorities for clarification on the visa process but haven’t heard back.
In the meantime, Freeze says members of their community in Martha’s Vineyard have started fundraising to support them.
