Les Ballets Africains, a renowned dance company from Guinea, was set to perform in Santa Fe’s Lensic Performing Arts Center on Feb. 10 before the group’s entire 2026 tour was canceled due to visa processing issues.
The news caught the attention of U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, who now hopes to be the “WD-40” for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, she said in an interview. The New Mexico Democrat co-signed a letter to the federal agency Thursday with U.S. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican, urging the agency to address extended delays for artists’ visas.
To perform or exhibit art in the U.S., international artists must apply for specialized visas, most commonly the P-3 visa for “culturally unique” groups, or the O-1 visa for individuals with extraordinary ability. Les Ballets Africains applied, meanwhile, for P-1 visa for its performers and a separate category, P-1s, for its essential support staff. The process for those types of visas involves a U.S. sponsor filing a petition with USCIS supported by documentation providing evidence of their exceptional abilities.
These visa petitions are legally required to be processed within 14 days. As of Thursday, processing time ranged between 12 and 13 months, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Still, applicants cannot submit petitions earlier than a year in advance. And for a timely response, arts organizations must pay $2,965 in premium processing fees.
“Bringing artists from across the world into our communities so that they can open our hearts and minds to new music sounds, new artistic excellence is very important. It’s how we understand our place and our connection to the rest of the world,” Leger Fernández said. “… There’s no national security reason, there’s no economic reason, there’s no logical reason for [USCIS] not doing their job.”
Lengthy delays
According to USCIS data from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, the average processing time for I-129 visas, which is the category the P-1, P-3 and O-1 fall into, was four and a half months. In that time period, USCIS completed 135,127 petitions, with 129,909 pending and 21,520 denied.
The bipartisan letter asks USCIS to explain the delays, account for staffing and backlogs, and outline how it plans to comply with the law. This comes after Leger Fernández pushed the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security to direct USCIS to comply with the 14-day processing requirement.
“They cannot apply for the visa until a year before their performance, but if it’s taking a year to get the visa, how does the Lensic, how does the International Folk Art [Market], how does anybody make plans to open up their stage to world-class musicians from around the world?” Leger Fernández asked in an interview.
A USCIS spokesperson would not answer questions about the substance of the letter, saying only in an emailed statement that the agency responds to congressional correspondence “directly through official channels.”
Local impact
Programs at the Lensic are generally planned up to 18 months in advance, according to Executive Director Joel Aalberts, while external concerts with Lensic 360 are confirmed four to six months ahead of the performance. The Lensic’s only performance affected by the visa backlog was Les Ballets Africains.
Mamoudou Conde, managing director of Les Ballets Africains, wrote in an email this week that about half the company’s members, including many of its principal artists and key performers, were denied P-1 employment authorization.
The venue learned of Les Ballets Africains’ cancellation six days before the show, according to Lensic spokesperson Daisy Geoffrey.
“Think about what that does to a small, local performing arts venue. That means that tickets they had sold have to get refunded. It means that valuable calendar space gets wasted,” Leger Fernández said. “So it impacts not just the musicians or performers. It also very much impacts the local nonprofits who are putting together these performances.”
The Lensic, Geoffrey wrote in an email, and Aspen Santa Fe Ballet both lost money on the canceled Les Ballets Africains show this year.
“The Lensic lost about $13,000 — that includes the rental staff wages, and the loss of income from what we would have gotten in ticket fees,” Geoffrey wrote. “Aspen Santa Fe Ballet lost the revenue on the tickets — we refunded 534 tickets total.”
Although the International Folk Art Market invites artists through a different type of shorter-term tourist visa, it has still faced challenges relating to visa processing this year, said market CEO Stacey Edgar in an interview. For the first time this year, the market introduced a waitlist in case artists did not get their visas in time.
“[Leger Fernández] has been extremely supportive of IFAM and of our artists who are traveling here,” Edgar said. “… [The market] really impacts our local communities as far as economically with tourism, and so these are really vital invitations.”
Leger Fernández said USCIS has the money to hire more staff to address this backlog “because these kinds of processes are paid for. They need to just get the staff on, and they need to make it a priority.”
“We hope that they’ll respond to our letter with an explanation of why it’s taking so long and a commitment to follow the statutory obligation,” Leger Fernandez said. “We want them to do their job.”
Hope for change
Conde wrote Les Ballets Africains has toured extensively throughout the U.S. since the 1950s, including performances on Broadway, among its other global stops.
“Given this extraordinary legacy, the company’s decades-long history of successful performances in the United States, and its internationally recognized role in cultural diplomacy, it is difficult to understand why both the immigration petitions for so many of its principal artists and the subsequent visa applications were denied,” Conde wrote. “These decisions prevented one of Africa’s most respected cultural institutions from carrying out a long-planned cultural exchange with American audiences.”
Conde added that company leaders hope the decisions can be “carefully reviewed.”
“We remain hopeful that Les Ballets Africains will once again have the opportunity to share its artistic excellence and cultural heritage with audiences across the United States,” he wrote.
