What are our Chances for Undeclared Children?

Sponsoring Family
1

Hi,

I appreciate your feedback and advise in advance.
Received a letter requesting an explanation for our 5 undeclared children.

Me and my husband are both annulled. I am the principal applicant. I have one daughter from my ex and he has 4 from his former marriage.

All will not be accompanying since in my case, I dont even know where they live, I will only spend a few hours with my kid and after that her dad will get her.

I seldom see her, twice or 3 times a year. I asked my daughter during the time of application if she wants to come with me and she said we can skype but wont leave his dad behind. This broke my heart…

With my current husband,he lost contact with all his kids. Since we will not be able to provide any single document from them ( passport,pictures etc) we decided not to declare since it may take so long before we can gather this docs and most likely,we wont get any and our ex’s wont let them come with us anyway.

Another is that,the marriage certificate I submitted was dated july 2 ( marriage in municipality) but our actual wedding with 150 guests was july 4.

In the application,i wrote july 4 because its really our anniversary date for 8 yrs before getting married, which totally confused me with the new date on the marriage certificate.

I have asked relatives and friends and they referred me to a person who used to work in an agency,spoke to her re our situation with our kids and told me to not declare, i didnt pay her or anything but during the call from immigration,i was asked why i didnt declare and since i was so startled with the word fraudulent that they were telling me that i can be sued, i told them that someone advised me to not declare. Now,in the written explanation,they thought im also paying a representative.

Now we have our own baby. Life has been unfair to us, with my ex manipulating every situation in my life, especially my kid. Now, we want to start a new life in canada. Clean slate. Hope you can help us as to how to go about our explanation and what is our chance of passing for immigration for the whole family. We just had our file no and thats it. We are at the early stage of the application to canada.

Thank you so much!

2

You have to declare all children under the age of 19 even if they are non-accompanying. Failing to do so is misrepresentation (lying in your application) which will guarantee a refusal and may also result in a 5 year ban from Canada.

When you say “during the call with immigration” are you referring to CIC? It’s not all that clear in your post. If you have actually already submitted your application with the misrepresentation and CIC has called you on it - then you need to explain why you omitted the children, apologize for this mistake and include corrected forms with all of the children and their information listed (even though they are non accompanying). Even if you do this, there is certainly still a significant chance CIC will refuse your application because you committed misrepresentation in your original application.

Note that if your immigration stream requires proof of funds, you will have to make sure that you have sufficient proof of funds to cover all of your dependents (both accompanying and non accompanying). This means you’ll need to be able to show proof of funds to cover 8 people.

3

Thank you for your immediate response in my query. The call came from manila immigration and not CIC. Thus, can we still mitigate the situation since it was our country’s immigration who reprimanded us on this matter? or the bearing is the same from manila immigration and CIC?

Thank you for shedding some light in our case.

4

The Manila visa office is CIC (the Manila visa office is CIC’s local office in Manila). So the bearing is the same.

There is always some chance you may be able to mitigate the situation - and you should certainly try. However if you submitted an application without declaring children, this is a clear case of misrepresentation and it’s quite possible CIC will treat it as such. Good luck.

5

Will certainly explain our side and hope they reconsider.

How about the erroneous marriage date I placed in the application form,instead of july 2,i placed july 4. This error wasnt indicated in the letter of explanation,but since I want to come and clean and redeem ourselves in the process. is it alright if I raise this in the letter as well?

Was there ever an applicant,in the history of your career,that a family still got approved of their visa despite the non declaration of their children, and the only downside was,they can no longer bring with the u declared children with them?

Feeling positive and hopeful here…

6

Correction:

Was there ever a time in the history of your career, that an applicant still got approved of their visa despite the undeclared children scenario,and the only repercussion to the situation was not being able to bring the undeclared children with them to canada?

Will CIC consider my explanation or is it catch 22? ( Damn if I do, damn if I dont situation )

Thank you again for all the help and support.

7

I think the marriage date error is a small one. I would explain it - but not worry about it too much.

I’m not an immigration lawyer or consultant - and can’t comment on your second question. However what I would suggest is that CIC won’t accept your application as is (i.e. without all children listed). For your application to have any chance of success - you will have to provide CIC with a corrected version of the form that lists ALL of the undeclared children and their full details. CIC will also expect all of the undeclared children to obtain medicals. If you are unable to obtain medicals for some or all of the children - you will have to explain this situation to CIC’s satisfaction and prove why you cannot obtain medicals for each one of them. Typically the kind of proof accepted by CIC is legal/court documentation proving you have no custody of these children and no visitation rights (i.e. your ex spouse has sole custody) as well as some sort of evidence (e.g. email communication) from your ex spouse showing that you asked for medicals to be completed for the children and your ex spouse refused to cooperate.

CIC will not accept the application you originally submitted. There is still quite a bit of work on your part required to have any chance of approval.

8

Thank you so much for all the help.

Medicals for our undeclared kids would be far fetch for now, ( i can already imagine what my ex would say ) . Though we have shared custody of our kids with our ex’s, its still not being shared justifiably with us. If you know what I mean.
I will start creating my explanatation to CIC with the hope that they will still reconsider.

Will update you on our progress.

Thank you and more power to this website!

9

Hi i need some advice…
My partner is in canada …he didnt declare our children because his mom said that if he is in the port of entry ih they ask him he always answer “no” and he did what his mother said…now he git his PR already and he go home to get marry me …can he get our undeclared kids?i need some advice please

10

Hello,

Thank you for sharing your situation and question with us.

We can appreciate that you and your boyfriend would be concerned about this situation.

Unfortunately, we are unable to provide you any definitive information regarding your situation.

You may want to read some information in some of our previous Settlement.Org What Are Our Chances For Undeclared Children? discussion threads.

As you may already know, the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada OP 2 Processing Members of the Family Class Operations Manual states,

We suggest that you may want to contact a Lawyer or a reputable Immigration Consultant who is familiar and experienced with Canadian immigration issues to see if they can provide you with some legal advice and some assistance regarding this situation.

I hope this information is helpful. Please let us know if you have further questions and if there is any follow up to your question/situation.

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Anna
Settlement.Org Content and Information/Referral Specialist, CIRS
Settlement.Org

11

Hello Anna,

   how are you?

i have some question i know you could help me out.

my husband sponsored me & my child( Philippines).

i done everything what CIC requirements asked me to do, the only thing take awhile to get our permament residence is because of my child.

until now we still keep waiting her new & correct birth certificate back home(Philippines) so we can proceed to apply passport & medical to her.

processing documents back home is like killing time.

my question is how can i contact CIC to let them know the situation of my child birth certificate is still on process?

second my open work permit under spousal soon to be expired January 2017 but i already applied renewal/extended open work permit under spousal last October, but i haven’t get it.

how can i find if they received my application for renewal/extended under spousal open work permit?

how long it could be before i received the new permit?

hope you could this. thank you very much

shiela

12

Hello Shiela,

Thank you for your questions.

In terms of how you can contact Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), it is best that you contact the IRCC Call Centre directly.

I hope this information is helpful. Please let us know if you have further questions and if there is any follow up to your question/situation.

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Anna
Settlement.Org Content and Information/Referral Specialist, CIRS
Settlement.Org