By Diana Chandler - Posted at Baptist Press:
Published November 10, 2025
GORDON, Texas (BP) – Albert Oliveira, pastor of First Baptist Church of Gordon, Texas, voluntarily returned to his birth country of Brazil Nov. 9 after a visa rule change and yearslong processing backlog blocked him from renewing his legal status.“We exhausted all the possibilities,” Oliveira told Baptist Press from his mother’s home in Brazil, where he, his wife Caroline and their 3-year-old son arrived Sunday. “What I’m doing isn’t necessarily self-deporting, but simply leaving before the visa expires.”
He will continue to pastor First Baptist Gordon, he said, preaching and holding meetings online while the church’s pastor of discipleship handles local duties. After a year, he will reapply for an R-1 visa for religious workers in an attempt to return to Texas and continue to serve the church.
“For this visa, you need to stay out of the country for at least 12 months in order to reset the possibility to apply again for another possible five years,” Oliveira said. “I will stay here (in Brazil) until we can go back after the 12 months. But our hope is that something still happens and we possibly can go back earlier, maybe a rule change.”Oliveira was among an unspecified number of pastors in a line of 214,771 individuals seeking EB-4 visas as of March 2025, according to an analysis of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data by the CBS News Data Team, after an unexpected rule change in April 2023 lumped R-1 visa applications with others in the EB-4 category. In March 2022, there were 71,147 applicants, already a backlog for the program that issues 10,000 EB-4 visas a year. The numbers indicate a 200 percent increase in applications in a three-year span.