Admissibility Hearing HELP

[jkimtag]

My husband and I married Sept 2009, we applied for permanent residence status, spousal sponsorship July 2010. We also applied for a work permit for my husband. He is from South Korea
In April my Husbands passport was seized due to an investigation.
Unfortunately we have made some mistakes and now face an admissibility hearing.
My family owns a Cafe in which my husband helped out for awhile. Naively we were unaware that this was illegal. we assumed it was family helping family. Later we moved to a new area, I was offered a better job and the new area would have more options for my husband once he got papers.
At this new job I worked a great deal of hours. Sometimes my husband would come sit at my work and play on his laptop. There were many times in which I asked him to help me with my work, we were unaware that he was not allowed to volunteer in this manner.
What are our options? What can we do to prepare for our hearing? What happens if we lose our hearing?

 

[RobsLuv]

Get a lawyer. "Volunteering" without being paid is not illegal - I did clerical work at our church for a couple of years without being paid, and the reason was that the church was not in a position to pay office staff to do the work. It never became an issue - but if someone had reported me as working, they would have made an issue of it. I remember hearing about someone being hauled in for an admissibility hearing for singing in a church choir!! If someone makes a report, they will follow up. The key is whether or not he was paid, and/or whether his volunteering meant that a job for someone else was eliminated. The difficulty is - it's easy to prove you've been paid for something . . . not so easy to prove you haven't been unless someone with some impeachable credibility can swear to it. Your family, obviously, cannot provide that piece - but if your new employer was not paying your husband to "help" you, and his doing so was not taking a job away from someone else, he's not done anything wrong. Testimony from your employer to that effect may help.

It might also help to read through the Foreign Workers Manual - particularly the Overview in Section 5.1 that describes what is and isn't considered to be work that requires a permit.