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| Deborah Parsons and husband Raul Oscar Alvarez-Hervas. (Supplied photo) |
TORONTO -- Deborah Parsons thought she had secured love and a happy
future when she sponsored her new Cuban husband to Canada nine years
ago.
Instead, she brought home violence, debt and a now-convicted domestic
abuser intent on bringing the rest of his family to his new country.
And despite her repeated warnings to the immigration department about
her husband’s past since coming to Canada, they won’t tell her what they
are doing to ensure members of his family are not allowed to come here
as well.
“Now that the veil of control and abuse has lifted, my hindsight has
become quite clear,” Parsons, 45, wrote in a letter to Citizenship and
Immigration Minister Chris Alexander. “I was only used for sponsorship,
then required to be the bread winner, a maid, a chef, a laundress, a
secretary, an employment agency and a charity organization.”
She urged the minister to stop her husband from sponsoring his family
and to provide her with information on the case to “ease the pain of
the shame I carry daily for bringing someone like this to Canada.”
In an e-mail that arrived Thursday, Parsons was assured CIC is well
aware of her concerns regarding her husband. “All information received
will be carefully assessed and considered and the appropriate action
taken.”
But it also said the Privacy Act prevents them from sharing any
information about the “initiation or outcome of any investigation.”
Parsons was aghast. “Why, if I am still married to this (man) and am
the Canadian who sponsored him, do I have no right to know what’s going
on?” she demands. “Why does a whole Cuban family get sponsored to Canada
on the back of (an alleged) fraud?”
In February 2003, a vacationing Parsons met lifeguard Raul Oscar
Alvarez-Hervas at a Cuban resort when he rescued her sister following a
paragliding accident. After a whirlwind telephone and e-mail romance,
she returned to marry him three months later. “I was a stupid girl who
thinks, ‘Isn’t this amazing, the poetry, the dripping flower e-mails.
Isn’t he so romantic?’”
It took two years and thousands of dollars spent on paperwork, long
distance phone bills, 10 return flights and gifts for him and his family
before she managed to sponsor him here. But, just five months after his
arrival, Alvarez-Hervas disappeared and Parsons wouldn’t see him again
for 18 months.
Lucky for him, he came to Canada before a 2012 change was made to the
immigration act to combat marriage fraud. Now an immigrant spouse must
live with their Canadian sponsor for at least two years or their
permanent resident status will be revoked.
Alvarez-Hervas, who did not respond to numerous telephone messages asking for comment, was in the clear.
Her husband returned to Toronto in 2008 and convinced her he was now
ready to settle down. Foolishly, she took him back. But it was a
tumultuous reunion and on June 24 of that year, she says Alvarez-Hervas
beat her. Toronto Police charged him with theft under $5,000, two counts
of threatening death and assault with a weapon.
As the trial date approached, she was asked if she wanted it to go
ahead or see her husband diverted to the Partner Assault Response anger
management program for abusive spouses. “I opted for PAR, feeling mercy
is always the best choice,” she recalls.
They reconciled yet again and were together for another 18 months
before he left once more. In 2012, he was back, begging her to move in
with him. “I fell for it,” admits Parsons, who runs an event staffing
business.
Soon she was paying for his son and mother to come from Cuba for a
summer visit; she also saw the paperwork her husband had begun to
sponsor them here permanently.
“Once his family left,” she recalls, “he stopped talking to me and
told me I had to leave. I told him I would go, but first he’d have to
pay back what I’d spent on his family. He went bananas and he started to
attack me.”
On Oct. 26, 2012, police charged him once again with assault.
Alvarez-Hervas pleaded guilty this past April and was sentenced to
another anger management program as well as six months of probation. She
hasn’t seen him since.
Now drowning in his bills — “everything is in my name” — and shame,
Parsons blames her own lovestruck blindness. But her eyes are wide open
now and she hopes those of the immigration department are as well.
“I don’t mind the injury that has occurred, it is of my own doing,”
she admits. “But please don’t add insult to it by allowing him to
sponsor his mother and his son.”
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