A Spanish woman who has lived in the UK for 15 years has accused the Home Office of treating her family like criminals after her American husband and the father of her three children applied for a permanent residency (PR) card.

In a three-year ordeal, the Home Office threatened to deport the historian Stuart Ross three times, suggested he was lying about his wife’s work as a Spanish language teacher and refused to accept a judge’s verdict in a Belfast court that officials had been wrong to refuse him a PR card when he first applied in 2013.

“It was really frustrating and I am still angry,” said Maria Cristina Úbeda Tuero-O’Donnell, 41. “They treated us like criminals. We couldn’t travel because they had our passports. I was pregnant and I couldn’t travel on my own. I am an only child and my parents are elderly, but I couldn’t see them. My family in Spain couldn’t understand and were asking: ‘Why, what did you do?’”

Ross, 49, originally from Syracuse, New York, and Úbeda, originally from Madrid, have been married and living together in Derry since 2007. Ross moved there 16 years ago, initially as a PhD student.

He met Cristina in 2002 and they got married before he graduated. When they married he was granted a five-year permit to stay as a family member of an EU national. When that expired in 2013, he applied for PR, which is available to any non-EU spouse of an EU citizen, regardless of income.

He said he “naively” believed the application for PR would be a formality.

In his first application to the Home Office, he submitted tax returns as evidence that his wife was economically active, and thereby exercising her EU treaty rights to be in the country.



The Home Office told them this was insufficient evidence and they needed five years’ returns. He supplied these in two further applications along with other material including mortgage and bank statements, details of National Insurance contributions, a letter from his MP and one from a former tax inspector, Thomas Logue.

To his shock, the Home Office again turned down his application, telling him the returns were “not for official use” and did not prove his wife was working.

Each time he was refused Ross was told by the Home Office he “should now make arrangements to leave”.

The letters also gave him tips about Refugee Action, a charity that could help him book a flight, transport to the airport and assist with “reintegration” in America.

Ross’s three children, aged two, six and nine, were all born in Derry.

“At the time you are furious, you’re angry, frustrated, you run the whole gamut of emotions. There is nothing worse than doing the right thing but then being told that is not good enough. You feel powerless,” said Ross.

“My lawyer kept saying this is not a precedent-setting case. It feels like they were chasing an individual,” he said.

He then took the Home Office to court and won. But the Home Office refused to accept the judge’s decision and appealed. The Home Office’s appeal was thrown out on the grounds that the lower court had not made an error in law.

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While Ross’s ultimate victory against the Home Office should have given him peace of mind, he and his wife are still angry and, after reading about a Japanese woman who had her child benefit and driving licence cancelled by the Home Office, they contacted the Guardian to report that Haruko Tomioka’s case was not isolated.

“The way he was treated by the Home Office was disgraceful,” said Logue, a retired HMRC tax inspector who testified for Ross at his first-tier tribunal hearing. He had told the court that all Tuero-O’Donnell’s paperwork was “fully compliant” with tax laws.

But he told the Guardian that the Home Office official in court did not seem to grasp the basics of tax. “Cristina kept basic records, from which she made a tax return, but the Home Office official kept saying the records were not an official record. [The official] couldn’t follow that a record and a return are different.

“Every time they refused Stuart, they kept asking for the same things over and over again. It was like nobody was supervising them. It was like they had to meet immigration quotas.

“They were very aggressive, implying there was a conspiracy going on. Overall, their approach was unprofessional and vindictive.”

Tuero-O’Donnell says she felt persecuted.

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“I found it shocking that someone who has lived here legally for so long can suddenly be threatened with deportation,” she added.

The Home Office said it had pursued Ross’s case because he had failed to provide sufficient evidence.

“We exercised our right of appeal in this case to clarify points of law, and fully accept the outcome. Mr Ross had the right to reside and work throughout the process.”

Earlier this month the European parliament president, Guy Verhofstadt, wrote to Amber Rudd to express concerns about a series of incidents highlighted by the Guardian, including the threat to deport Tomioka, a Japanese woman who lives with her Polish husband in London.