Foreigner Police Horror Story

The following is completely true. I am stuck in the UK until May, and I have lost the 3.5 years of residence toward the 5 years I need to apply for permanent residence. And why? Read on...

In Prague, I wake up every morning to my cat's purring. I feed him, then look out the window at the beautiful park as I get ready for work. When I arrive at the school, I'm greeted with smiles and cheers. The children grin and shout “Hello, Miss Megan!” Some of them run up and hug me and tell me they're ready for English. I've got first and second graders this year, but the third, fourth, and fifth graders I taught last year always give me a happy hello when they see me in the hall.

I think of this every morning now as I wake up on the sofa provided to me by the only friend I could find outside of the Shengen zone, here in Edinburgh, Scotland. I look out the window at the gray sky and the wet, cracked bricks and concrete splattered with garbage. We do not live in a nice part of town. We don't have the money. I take a deep breath and inhale the terrible smell of a rodent that has died somewhere in the air vents of the building. The landlord promised he'd get it taken care of soon, but it's been three weeks already and it's only getting worse. I wish I was exaggerating or, better yet, making this up completely. But this is my reality. I'm terribly homesick, but I can't go home.

The first thing I do is check my email and phone for any news from the Czech Ministry of the Interior, the bureaucratic institution that has rendered me homeless. Most days there is nothing. Occasionally I get a message informing me that the committee decided not to meet again this week. They'll get back to me within 30 days, they say. They will send the decision by registered mail to my official address in Prague – where I am legally not permitted to go to pick it up. I've asked them if they would send it to me here in Scotland, or if I could sign a power of attorney for someone else to get it for me. So far, the only answers have been “I don't know” and “we'll get back to you on that.”

The committee is legally forbidden from communicating with people who have submitted appeals in any manner other than writing. No email, no phone. The only contact I have is a clerk with a stutter who always looks terrified because, as he told me at our fist meeting, this is his first case and he really has no idea how any of this works.

I'm a teacher at a Czech state základní škola. Not a language school or a private school, but a normal public one for the local children. We've got a great English program which takes place in the afternoon, after normal classes, but is still integrated with the school as a whole. All of the children in our program learn from native speakers in small groups. It's a spectacular program, and each of the teachers requires a great deal of experience and training before they begin work here. To be sure, it's not easy to replace a teacher that suddenly gets deported.

At the end of last June, I submitted my request to extend my long-term residency. I've done this twice before and I was terrified. They always manage to find some kind of problem, even if you've done everything exactly the same as last time. I handed the woman at the desk my application and all my documents. Proof of accommodation: newly signed lease for my apartment. Proof of reason to stay: letter from the živnostenský úřad extending my trade license. Proof of no debt: bezdlužnosti from the social and finance offices. Proof of finances: official, stamped bank statement showing regular deposits into my account for the past year, averaging several times more than the minimum required income.

The woman frowned at the bank statement. She wasn't sure if it was acceptable. Normally, she said, they want a document from the tax office. However, this was an official statement for a full year. She consulted her supervisor. Yes, they decided, this would be sufficient. I clearly make enough money to live here. I breathed a sigh of relief and went about my business, knowing it would probably take at least 9 months for them to process and approve my application.

It was nearly 4 years ago that I got my first visa to live in Prague. I had left behind my abusive family in America, vowing never to return to the country where everyone had guns but no one had health care. I'd had a miserable life there, had been depressed to the point of being near-suicidal for many years. There was nothing for me there. No friends. No home. Since coming to Prague, I had made a new life for myself. I had a beautiful apartment in a nice part of town and tons of friends, many of whom were like family. I paid my social security every month, filed my taxes every year. I had a happy, honest life, and most importantly, I wasn't living only for me. I wasn't working for a paycheck: I was teaching children. I was changing lives. Every day I saw those smiling faces and I knew how valuable I really was to the world.

I don't work at the school every day. Some days, I work for Bridge Publishing House. I'm a writer and editor for Bridge and Gate magazines, educational publications for Czech students learning English. While I'm teaching, I'm also brainstorming. I'm coming up with ideas for exercises and articles for the magazine. I'm making lists of grammar and vocabulary topics that should be covered and fun ways we can help the readers learn and understand them. Teachers are our main subscribers, so I keep notes on what would be helpful to have in my own classes. I love writing for the magazines. I can take all the ideas I use for my lessons and pass them on to other teachers. Indirectly, I'm teaching all of their kids, too, from primary school all the way through gymnazium and beyond.

A few months after submitting my application, I got a letter in the mail saying I had failed to prove my income. I had ten days to fix this error in my application, or else it would be rejected. I went to the finance office and obtained an official copy of my dáňové příznány, my tax form from the previous year, and brought that to them in person. The woman at the desk shook her head and told me she wouldn't accept that. I had to give them a platební výměr, a summary from the finance office of the taxes I'd paid last year. I quickly called the finance office and asked them for the document. Normally it takes them a week to process a request like this, but fortunately they were understanding when I told them it was for the foreigner police. They managed it in a few days, and I submitted it via registered mail. Back to waiting again.

I also have a private student whom I've taught for years. She's a teenager now, a student in gymnazium, and so tall I can hardly believe it. I always test out my ideas for the magazine on her, and we have a great time coming up with new ones. Her grammar and spelling have improved so much, it makes me so proud. I have taught her younger brothers as well, and even babysat a few times. They're a great family and always make me feel at home. They always invite me to stay for dinner and ask how my visa application is going. There's almost always an application in processing because it takes them so long to process them. By the time you get your residence card, you have about six months before it expires, and you have to get your next application in by then.

After another month, I got word that I still had not proven my income to their satisfaction. I had only a few days to fix the mistake. This time I went in person with a stack of signed, stamped invoices and a new, updated official bank statement. I figured it will be easier to sort this out in person, face to face with a living, thinking human being. I showed the woman the documents, explaining that this was the only proof of my current income that I had, but she pushed them away. She wouldn't accept them, she said, because they were not suitable proof of anything. These documents could be faked. The only document that mattered was the one from the tax office, and according to that, I didn't earn enough money.

How could that be possible? My average income is several times what I need to get by. In fact, I earn more per month than the average Prague resident. She showed me the tax document and, after making a few rude remarks to me (you learn to ignore those, as they're standard procedure), she said they only look at my tax-free income. I don't really understand the details of taxes, but my accountant submitted mine with a 60% deduction, as a business owner. The clerk did some math and calculated that I earned 400 kc less per month (after taxes) than I required. 400 kc. That's it. If I could somehow prove that I earned 400 kc more per month, I would be all set.

Well that's easy, I told her. I earn way more money now than I did then. These are last year's taxes, and it's already October. But I can't file my taxes for this year until January, so what do I have to do? Should I re-file my taxes for last year, without the 60% deduction? Because I'm happy to do that, if that's what is necessary.

The woman's eyes went wide. No. She said I absolutely must not re-file my taxes. She pointed again at the 60% deduction: that's the maximum I can take. According to her, if I took any less than that, it would actually reduce my income in the eyes of the foreigner police.

But, I told her, that doesn't make any sense. If 40% of my income is taxable, that doesn't mean I'm paying all of that in taxes. I obviously earn plenty more than this. By this logic, you'd have to earn 30,000 kc per month in order to survive in a cheap apartment.

The woman shrugged her shoulders. Sorry. I know it doesn't make sense, but it's out of my hands. This is the way it works. She sifted through my documents and pulled out my lease. This is the problem, she said. Your rent is too high. Your landlord doesn't specify how much you pay for heat and electricity, so the state automatically adds 1000 kc to cover that.

I nearly laughed. In fact, my heat and electricity were included in my rent, we just hadn't written it into the lease. The woman nearly smiled then and said well that's it, you're all set. Just re-submit the lease with a line saying the utilities are included in the cost of the rent, send it by registered mail with a letter explaining you are correcting a mistake, and your application will be approved.

What a relief. I went home, made the change immediately, and sent the new lease by registered mail with a letter the very next day. A week later I got a letter saying my document had been accepted and my application was in process once again.

I hesitate to keep typing now, because I want the story to end there. I did exactly what the woman told me. That should have been the end of it.

A few weeks later, I got another letter. I opened it excitedly, certain that my application had been approved.

Czech legalese is nearly impenetrable to me despite having studied the language for years, so I passed it off to my Czech-speaking co-teacher. Her face was serious. It was not good news.

My application had been rejected due to a failure to prove sufficient income and failure to respond to a letter that I had never received, which had allegedly said, once again, that I hadn't proven my finances. According to them, I had ignored this letter, although I most certainly never received it.

The rejection letter was many pages long and went into details about the numbers. The information the woman had given me was completely wrong: it wasn't the 60% they were using to calculate my income, but the 40% I claimed for taxes. And I hadn't been 400 kc per month short, but more than 2000 kc. What's more, despite the previous letter I had received, they now wrote that they hadn't accepted my corrected lease, because there was a small typo on one of the pages. The landlord, a 75-year-old man, had changed the numbers on the lease, but had forgotten to change one of the words, leading to a contradiction. It was an obvious typo, but the ministry of the interior really didn't care.

The silver lining? I had the right to appeal if I disagreed with the decision. I had my boss call the police and ask exactly what I needed to do to successfully appeal. The woman on the phone said I should send them invoices, bank statements, any and all proof I had of my income – essentially, all the documents I had tried to submit before, the ones the clerk had refused to accept. Then the appeal would probably be rejected again, but then it would be passed on to the next level, and I would still be able to stay in the country until they made a new decision.

But I'd been misinformed before. I once had a clerk tell me I had the right to stay in the country, and then later found out I didn't. I nearly got deported that time, and only sheer luck allowed me to discover the problem in time to fix it. I wasn't about to take that risk again. What could I do that would guarantee approval the first time around?

The answer was the same as before: a platební výměr from the finance office showing that I earned enough money last year to pay all my expenses this year. Could I simply re-file my taxes? Why, yes, of course I could, according to the woman on the phone. In fact, that's what I should have done in the first place.

I resisted the urge to punch the wall in frustration. The woman at the office had insisted that re-filing my taxes was not an option. Either she had lied, or she didn't know what she was talking about... But there is no other source of information than those clerks. I had no choice but to trust her.

We had one more question: this fifteen days, was it calendar days or business days? She said it would surely be business days. These things are always calculated in terms of business days. But what if I couldn't get the document from the tax office in time? No problem, she said. If you're waiting on another office for your paperwork, all you have to do is send us a letter requesting more time to submit it, for the reason that I'm waiting on a government office. They'll extend the time and everything will be fine.

The company hired an accountant for me, who got to work re-calculating my income with a smaller deduction, and the boss wrote a letter for the police requesting more time to submit the document. I took my new tax forms to the finance office in person and sent a stamped copy of the tax form (with my newly calculated income) along with the letter requesting more time by registered mail. This was 9 business days after receiving the rejection letter.

It took the finance office a few days to process, but at last I got my new platební výměr and sent it in along with an official appeal letter. This was 12 business days after receiving the appeal letter. At last, I wasn't worried. I had done exactly what they told me to do. One might think I would have learned by then, but I was foolish enough to think that everything would be okay.

Two days later I got a letter saying my request for more time was rejected for the reason that I had no right to request more time. How was this possible? Because we had made a tiny mistake in the letter. Instead of saying it was an appeal (odvolání), my boss had written the word for appending documents to the application (dodatky). I had no right to append anything because I had already been rejected, and therefore I wasn't given any more time.

But I should still be fine, said my boss, because I had still submitted the appeal letter 12 business days after receiving the rejection letter. But my stomach fell through my feet into the floor below, because somehow I had a feeling that wasn't going to work out.

The foreigner police refused to give any more information over the phone, so my boss went with me in person to the office to sort out what had happened. We explained the situation to the woman at the desk, who was looking at my file on the computer screen. We never received any appeal, she said. Your case is already closed.

That's not true! It was all I could do not to shout. I showed her my copy of the appeal letter, and the sentence in the rejection letter saying I had 15 days to submit it. That's business days, right? I asked her. She nodded her head, yes, of course that's business days, it's always business days. She smiled. Well in this case, you should be all set. This is exactly what we needed from you. Let me just get my supervisor.

The supervisor was not smiling. She pointed at the sentence in the rejection letter: 15 days. If it were business days, she said, it would have said business days. You submitted your letter 16 calendar days after receiving this. Your case is closed. You have to leave.

It was at this point that I broke down sobbing, and my whole life in Prague started flashing through my head. I'd been living there nearly four years, paying social security and taxes, teaching children, doing educational work. My boss continued trying to negotiate with the clerks, pointing out that it was a question of a single day and that I had been misinformed, but they kept robotically repeating the same sentences over and over again: She did not appeal within the assigned period. Her case is closed.

She did not appeal within the assigned period. Her case is closed.

She did not appeal within the assigned period. Her case is closed.

There is nothing we can do, they said. She can submit an application for a new visa, but she can't be in the country until it's approved.

At last, my boss got them to admit that yes, I could try to appeal. But unless I could prove that they'd made a mistake, it would almost certainly be rejected.

I almost shouted again, trying to speak through the tears and the sobs. You DID make a mistake, I said. The woman told me I couldn't use bank statements and invoices as proof. She told me I couldn't re-file my taxes. She said if I changed my lease, it would all be fine. I did everything she said. She gave me the wrong information. And then two other people told me I had 15 business days to submit my appeal. The woman on the phone said we could get more time to submit my documents. I've done everything I was told to do. You made the mistakes, not me.

Again, the woman shrugged. Do you have any proof of this?

…

Proof?

I've tried in the past to get proof. I've asked clerks to write things down for me, and they've always refused, saying they're not allowed. I've asked them to speak to friends over the phone so I had a witness to what they said, and they said no, they're not permitted to speak to anyone on the phone. I thought once that I would tape our conversations, but then I found out that's illegal, too.

My boss hired a lawyer and they wrote me an appeal anyway. They went through my whole file, page by page, looking for discrepancies. They wrote about the misinformation I was given face-to-face, even though I didn't have any proof. They attached photos of me with the kids I teach, photos with my friends and co-workers, letters from my bosses at the school and the magazine emphasizing that I could not simply be replaced if I had to leave, begging them to let me stay. They also attached all my financial documents, showing that I clearly earned more than enough money and met all the requirements to stay in the country. The only issue was a single day, a tiny mistake based on misinformation and misunderstandings. I added a letter I wrote myself in Czech explaining my abusive family in America, the fact that I had no other home, the fact that I had done everything I could and would do anything to make this right.

We submitted my appeal on 18 December. I was given 60 days to remain in the country while it was processed. It was just before the holidays, so we'd lose 2 weeks, but of course I wouldn't be given any extra time to make up for it. The woman shrugged. They'll give you an answer sometime in January, she said. Legally, they have 30 days to send you an answer. Meanwhile, I would be permitted to stay in the country until 8 February. If I overstayed that period, I'd be expelled, not only from the Czech Republic, but from the entire Shengen zone, for 2 years.

I decided to submit an application for a completely new visa right away, in case my appeal was rejected. Better to do that sooner rather than later. Applications for new visas can't be submitted within the Czech Republic, however, so I'd have to go to Vienna to do it. Fine, I thought, no problem. I'll do it immediately.

But the clerk corrected me pretty quickly. You can't do that, she said. You have an exit order in your passport. The moment you leave the Czech Republic – not Shengen, just the country – you legally cannot return for 90 days. If you try to submit an application for a new visa, they will inspect your passport carefully, and when they see that exit order, they'll make sure the police prevent you from returning home.

No new application. No possibilities. Just waiting, waiting, waiting.

I kept working. The kids needed their teacher. I had to hide my stress, fear, anxiety, and give them a smile every day. The magazine needed to be written, no matter how I was falling apart inside. I spent Christmas all alone. I stopped sleeping normally. I was shaking and foggy-headed all the time. I didn't know where I'd be living in two months.

My friends, coworkers, and students' parents were all incredibly supportive. They'd do anything they could to help me, they said. They'd write letters. They'd call the police for me. But there was nothing they could do.

My boss at the school started to worry. There was no replacement for me, should I be forced to leave. It was the middle of the school year. We were planning the next few months, trying to carry on as though nothing had happened. Every day, my coworkers asked me if there was any news. Every day I just had to shrug and shake my head. It took all I had to keep myself from breaking down at work.

28 days after I submitted my appeal, I got a letter from the ministry of the interior. It said that they had received my appeal and were beginning to process it. (It turns out the “answer” they were obligated to give me within 30 days of me submitting my appeal was nothing more than an acknowledgment that they had actually opened it.) It told me the name and the contact info for the man responsible for my file. He was to be my only contact from there on in. The letter said I had 5 days to add anything new to my file before it was judged.

I went with my boss again and we met this man in person. He was nervous, stuttering, hard to understand. He'd never done this before. He said they would try to judge my file the next week, but they already had a lot of cases and they probably wouldn't get to mine yet. The committee only meets on Wednesdays, so it'd probably be two weeks before they looked at my case.

I did some quick math in my head. If I had to leave, it would be that same week. They'd judge my case on Wednesday and I'd have to leave by Sunday – not enough time for me to get their answer, since they only send information by certified mail, which wouldn't be sent until Thursday and always takes 3-4 business days to get through. What was I supposed to do?

The stuttering man didn't know. He said he'd try to find out. He'd try to prioritize my case so I'd have my answer in time, but he wasn't sure if that was possible. One thing he was sure of: I did not have the right to extend my permission to stay in the event they didn't judge my case in time, because my appeal had been submitted one day late. He shrugged and said he hoped my appeal was successful.

The following Wednesday I had a serious panic attack. I ended up in the hospital that night with stomach pain so severe I thought I was dying. The doctor said it was just stress and ordered me to rest and relax for a while. I got hysterical then at the mere suggestion that I should relax. He gave me some diazepam and said I should take it for a few days. I didn't know where I'd be living in two weeks.

The committee didn't get to my case that week. It would be another 7 days before I'd have any kind of information. I had 11 days left on my exit order.

The next week, my boss and coworkers called the stuttering clerk about six times in one day demanding information. He kept saying he didn't know, he'd call us when he knew. I tried to work, but I couldn't focus. I didn't know where I'd be living in 2 days.

Finally, we got word that the committee had decided not to meet that week. They'd meet the following Wednesday. 3 days after I had to be out of the country.

So that was it. They'd had my appeal for nearly 2 months and hadn't done anything with it. When we demanded that they give me some kind of permission to stay, that it was inhumane to deport me when I had no other home and they still hadn't judged my appeal, they said sorry, she submitted her appeal one day late. She has no right to stay.

I had to leave.

I got in touch with my only non-Shengen friend in the world, here in Edinburgh. He said I could sleep on his sofa for as long as I needed. Plane tickets for the weekend were double the weekday price, and I would have no right to work in Scotland, so I had to save money where I could. I bought a ticket leaving Friday. I had 24 hours to get my things together and leave Europe.

I ran around like a crazy woman, making duplicate keys so a friend could check on my apartment, dropping my cat off at a coworker's place and saying goodbye to him for I didn't know how long, wishing my best friend a happy birthday and apologizing for having to miss his party, arranging my bank account, trying to clean perishables out of my apartment, trying and failing to apply for a new trade license so I could apply for a new visa in England (in one final twist of tragic irony, they said this was impossible, and I'd have to wait until I got back to Shengen to apply for a new visa), and meeting my friends for one final goodbye drink.

No one could believe it was really happening. My boss was frantically searching for someone to take over my class until I could come back. My friends hugged me and cried with me and promised they'd do anything they could to help. One person at a neighboring table overheard our conversation and insisted that it was my own fault that this had happened. I should have made sure I had the right information. If I hadn't followed correct procedures, then the government had every right to kick me out.

My friends saved me from that argument and sent the guy packing. The next morning at 4:30, numb from shock and lack of sleep, I left my apartment, took the bus to the airport, and said goodbye to my home. If the ministry of the interior didn't somehow approve my appeal and give me a way to go back home, I'd have to be gone for 90 days. 3 months homeless, jobless, far away from my friends, my family, my life. 3 months without the smiles of the children, the songs and the laughter, the view of the park, the cuddles of my cat. 3 months in gray, cold, wet Einburgh with no job and no life.

And so, every morning I get up and I check my email and my phone for any news, any information. I try to convince myself that I'm on vacation, that it's just free time off, but I can't make myself believe it. I look back over this long story and I try to find the point where I did something wrong, where I made a mistake beyond doing as I was instructed by the only sources of information I had, and come up empty. I try to keep in touch with my friends in Prague. I wish I could just drink the waiting time away, but I don't have enough money to buy alcohol in this country. My savings is already starting to dwindle.

It's not permanent. I know they probably won't approve my appeal, won't let me go home until my 90 days is up. But I have a return ticket for the 9^th of May, and I cross the days off on the calendar and pray for the time to go faster. I try to think about how it will feel when I see the children again. When they all chorus, “Hello, Miss Megan!” and tackle me with hugs. My boss at the school is trying to manage my lessons without me there. The parents have sent supportive emails wishing I can come home soon.

It's finally sunk in, these past few days, that I can't go home. I can't go home.

And it's not just me. This happens all the time. Every single native English speaking friend I have in Prague has a story like this. I do not know a single person who has ever applied for a visa, or for an extension, and had everything go smoothly. Not once, not ever.

Depending on who you talk to, you always get different information. According to the EU, all visa information is supposed to be freely available to anyone who wants it, but it doesn't work that way in the Czech Republic. Sure, they have a web site. They even have information in English. But it's all very vague. It says, for example, that your application requires proof of income and lists the minimum each person requires for their expenses, but it does not say what's acceptable proof. That information can only be gotten from the clerks at the foreigner police. And they can tell you whatever they want. They can make mistakes, or even give you false information on purpose, and there's not a thing you can do about it. They refuse to ever provide you with any proof of the information they give you, so that you can never claim the mistake is theirs, and it's not permitted to ever contact directly the people who actually make the decision on each case.

Some people ask me why I even want to go back, after all the hell they've put me through. The answer is as simple as this: it's my home. That is where I live. That is where my life is. I have no other home in the world.

I have only one problem in Prague, and that is the ministry of the interior, the foreigner police, who do nothing but repeat the only thing that matters to them:

She did not appeal within the assigned period. Her case is closed.