LAWYERS OF Australian missionary Patricia Fox on Monday filed a motion for reconsideration before the Bureau of Immigration (BI) after it denied the extension of her missionary visa.
In a statement, Ms. Fox’s lawyers said the bureau’s deportation order is not yet “final and executory” as a petition for review is still pending at the Department of Justice.
“Hence, the decision to grant or deny the application for extension or renewal of her missionary visa should not be based and hinge(d) on the order of deportation. And even Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said that the decision of the BI whether to extend her missionary visa will be ‘without prejudice to the resolution of her appeal,’” the statement said.
Ms. Fox filed a petition for review at the DOJ on Sept. 3 over the deportation order against her. She asked the BI to reverse its order which denied her visa extension and grant the application for renewal or extension visa subject to the result of the petition for review filed before the Department of Justice.
The BI also stated that Ms. Fox, who has been in the Philippines for 27 years, stayed beyond the ten years allowed in a memorandum of agreement between the bureau and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines.
But according to Ms. Fox’s lawyers, the agreement “did not preclude the extension or renewal thereof for another ten (10) years.”
As argued in her motion: “As a matter of fact, her missionary visa had been repeatedly extended by the Honorable Office for several times, first, during the first ten-year period from 1990, the year she arrived in the country, then in the year 2000 or thereafter, for the second ten-year period, and later in 2014 for the third ten-year period.”
The motion said further that with the granting of Ms. Fox’s missionary visa on Sept. 5, 2014, it remained valid until 2024, if still up for renewal every two or three years.
“Moreover, contrary to the supposition of the Honorable Office, the allowable time for the applicant to stay in the country has technically not yet expired because she was given another ten (10) years from 2014 to 2024 to render missionary work in the country,” the motion said. — Vann Marlo M. Villegas

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