Non-immigrant couple; husband forced to miss birth of baby?

[J1Brit]

Hi,

I would be very grateful for some advice. I am a visiting research scholar on a J1 visa. I am from Great Britain and was invited here to work on US-government defense research. My fiance (also British) travelled with me on a B2 visa (the US embassy in London told him that this was the appropriate visa to have whilst accompanying me). At customs he was granted an initial 6 months stay. We have been together and cohabited for 8 years. My fiance has an ongoing cancer condition, for which he has had surgery and chemotherapy and will face more in the future. He therefore has to have regular scans and so when his stay was up he arranged for his scans to be performed whilst he was in the UK. Since it is highly likely that he will require more surgery in the near future and this surgery would totally rule out the already slim possibility we had of having children, we decided that we should try for a baby before he travelled (in case he had to have the surgery before coming back). Happily we got pregnant (we had been told the chances were very small) and so when he returned to the US we got married. Forgive me for going into so much detail but I felt it was necessary so that there was no misunderstanding of our motivations for getting married. I am committed to serving out my contract which will expire just as the baby is due. I will therefore be having the baby in the US. The problem is that when my fiance (now husband) came back to the US he was given a hard time by CBP who would not listen to what he had to say. We have recently discovered that they have written "No COS, No AOS" on his I94. They also told him that he would be forbidden from re-entering the US for at least 2 years. Does this mean that my husband will be forced to leave me and that he will miss the birth of his baby? We are very worried about this for obvious reasons but also because I have a medical condition for which I rely on my husband greatly, making pregnancy concerns even bigger if there is no-one around. Neither of us has any intention of staying on in the US after my contract is served. We have enjoyed our time here but were very settled in our Edinburgh home (UK), have financial ties to the UK, my husband has his own scientific career to return to (which has been on hold whilst we have been in the US) and our parents are desperately looking forward to spending time with their only grandchild.

Should we apply for a change of status/extension of stay despite having "No-COS/AOS" written on his I94 or would this be futile, perhaps even sealing the fate that he can never return?
Should he take the long and very expensive return journey, relying on the US embassy in London to grant a J2 visa even though CBP said re-entering would not be possible?

(My government sponsors in Washington have sponsored my husband for the transition to a J2 visa. )

You appear to have entered with the wrong visa after marriage and violated the rules from what I hear here. He can't come back on a B visa.

Make sure you have immigration counsel review all the details and help you do the correct application. It should be resolvable but do not do it yourself.