This sponsored column is by Law Office of James Montana PLLC. All questions about it should be directed to James Montana, Esq., Janice Chen, Esq., and Victoria Khaydar, Esq., practicing attorneys at The Law Office of James Montana PLLC, an immigration-focused law firm located in Falls Church, Virginia. The legal information given here is general in nature. If you want legal advice, contact us for an appointment.

If you want a visa to come to the United States, you fill out the application, you pay the fee, you wait for an appointment, and you sit for an interview with a consular officer at a U.S. embassy or consulate. There are narrow exceptions. Being a friend of the President is not one of them.

Or it didn’t use to be.

On October 25, Brazilian Senator Flávio Bolsonaro – eldest son of the imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro – lost Brazil’s presidential runoff to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, reportedly by more than 4.4 million votes. The next day, Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered him to surrender his passports as part of a money-laundering investigation. He did not. On Tuesday, a senior State Department official announced that Bolsonaro and his family would be granted U.S. visas. On Wednesday morning, he landed by private jet at Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport.

We doubt very much that Senator Bolsonaro sat for a visa interview at the U.S. Embassy in Brasília, or at any of the U.S. consulates in Brazil, sometime between Monday’s court order and Tuesday’s departure. (And if he already held a valid visa, there was nothing for the State Department to announce.) So what, exactly, happened? Let’s consider the possibilities.

He was paroled. The Secretary of Homeland Security may parole a person into the United States “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” INA § 212(d)(5)(A). If that is what happened, it would at least be lawful. But we doubt that, too. An ordinary person who asks for parole files Form I-131 with USCIS and, in our experience, waits more than two years for a decision. Merely asking USCIS to expedite the application takes more than a month to get an answer, and the answer is routinely no. Senator Bolsonaro, it seems, got his overnight. If he was paroled, say so, and explain how he got to the front of the line.

The visa requirement was waived for an “unforeseen emergency.” The regulations do allow this. 8 C.F.R. § 212.1(g). But losing an election you have been campaigning in for a year is not unforeseen. Neither is a court order in an investigation you have known about for months. Indeed, Bolsonaro’s younger brother, Eduardo, said on a podcast earlier this month that Flávio should leave the country if he lost. Some emergency.

A visa will be issued after the fact. That isn’t how visas work. A visa is permission to travel to a port of entry and request admittance. Issuing one to a man who is already in Miami is like issuing a fishing license to a poacher with prize tarpon already gaffed and flopping on the deck.

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