Denied entry to the US = arrest?

Published Sep 5, 2020

1 Post

So I graduated nursing school in May, passed the NCLEX, and have patiently been waiting for my license to become active. I’ve seen most of my classmates land awesome jobs while I’ve been sitting all Summer waiting. I gave some benefit of the doubt to the BON because they were furloughed and there’s a pandemic, but it’s been almost 4 months. Many of my emails/calls went unanswered by the BON. I did some online fishing and landed the BON directors email. Well, she emailed back that my application will need investigation because I was arrested. I was dumbfounded because I was never arrested, ever.

Many unanswered calls/emails later and someone finally got back to me that I was “arrested” by border patrol in 2016. Well that’s news to me because they simply denied my entry to the US and sent me back home... There was no mention of committing a crime, being arrested, no handcuffs or anything all they did was fingerprint me and put me on another flight. I’ve also made it through an entire immigration journey (K1-citizenship) without this being a problem. I’d assume that if this was an actual immigration arrest/crime I would’ve never gotten the K1 visa months later or had an easy immigration journey.

I have no idea what to do. People mentioned sending documents from the incident, but I wasnt given nothing nor am I aware of any. I wrote a letter explaining the situation to the BON and I really fear repercussions of checking that I’d never been arrested. The NJ BON gave me a HHA license and ran the same background check two years ago and this wasn’t an issue then... I just don’t understand.

Anyone know the time frame on how long a decision will take? Am I going to be left indefinitely pending forever? I’m just so frustrated.