LONDON, ONT. -- Marilyn Alvarez is anxiously waiting to hear if her Colombian husband Wilson Cordero will be deported in less than a week.

As the clock ticks toward a Tuesday decision, Alvarez is pleading to the government to review his case, before Cordero is sent back to Colombia on February 26th.

“Just thinking about it makes me want to cry because I just started a family with him, we want to have children, we want to have a life together, he wants to go to school, he wants to work, all of our dreams are just being taken away from us,” said Alvarez.

Cordero, along with his mother and younger brother say they fled Colombia after their lives were threatened by a member of a guerrilla group. Their journey to Canada is complicated because of the route they chose to take.

They arrived in the United States on a visitor’s visa in 2016 and made their first attempt to come to Canada by going to the border office in Buffalo, but due to the Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the US they were denied refugee status in Canada.

Under the agreement persons seeking refugee status must make their claim in the first country they arrive in. They were asked to sign an exclusion paper that stated they could not enter Canada for 12 months.

But four months later, growing desperate because their US travelers visa was up for expiration, the trio decided to enter the country illegally at the border crossings between the State of Vermont and Canada to seek asylum.

Wilson has an application for permanent residence pending on humanitarian grounds. His mother and his younger brother, have been able to obtain permanent residency in Canada through a private sponsorship.

The humanitarian and compassion application takes thirty one months to complete and does not stop deportation. It has been nineteen months since Wilson applied. But his removal order is set for February 26th.

Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has refused to defer his removal. Now, the family anxiously waits, for a hearing to be heard next Tuesday.

In the meantime, Marilyn is pleading with the government to look at her husband’s case. “…to make sure that they understand that if he does go back to Colombia, he’s at risk, he has no employment there, no support".

If Cordero is deported back to Colombia, the application remains valid and it will be decided either in favour or against. But his lawyer says there is a big difference in the probability of approval once someone is out of the country

"The approval rate for these applications, when the person is in Canada these days is approaching 60 per cent, but once someone is deported the application has a success rate of less than five per cent one of those reasons, is simple that the person is no longer here,” said Wilson’s Immigration & Refugee Lawyer, Richard Wazana.

CBSA says ultimately the “Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) assesses whether a person would face persecution, torture, risk to life or risk of cruel and unusual treatment or punishment, if returned to his or her country of origin. Once all avenues have been exhausted, the CBSA has a statutory obligation to enforce the removal order as soon as possible.

And last year, the CBSA says it enforced the removal of 316 foreign nationals to Colombia. Currently, there are 162 Colombian Nationals waiting for permission to stay – and Cordero is one of them.

Despite the fact that Global Affairs Canada said it advises Canadians to exercise a high degree of caution in Colombia due to high levels of crime, there is no deferral or temporary suspension of removals to Colombia at this time.

Wilson’s wife Marilyn has started a petition https://www.change.org/p/justin-trudeau-stop-wilson-cordero-s-deportation in an attempt to generate enough signatures to draw national attention to his case, adding that her husband’s life is here and that “Colombia is no longer his home, Canada is his home. He works here, he has a wife here, his mom and brother will remain here, he needs to be here with his family”.