Jun 20, 2026
Ana Candida Evora watched the biggest night of her son’s life on a screen, an ocean away.
Her son, Josimar “Vozinha” Dias, a 40-year-old goalkeeper for tiny Cape Verde, made seven saves Monday to hold Spain to a 0-0 draw in his country’s first-ever World Cup match in Atlanta. He cried at the final whistle.
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Evora, a 59-year-old house cleaner, watched from home because getting into the U.S. could have meant fronting a bond as high as $15,000 — part of a U.S. Department of State program the Trump administration rolled out in 2025 to curb visa overstays.
The $15,000 is refundable, but setting aside that money, even temporarily, is enough to stop most families from traveling.
What actually happened to Vozinha’s mom
After the match, Vozinha told reporters why he was crying. “My mum could not be here either for a visa issue, and the money we had to pay for it,” he said, adding that the family “did not manage to do this in time.”
The clip took off. Vozinha’s Instagram following jumped from around 50,000 to several million in days, and U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — who is of Cape Verdean ancestry — said he called Secretary of State Marco Rubio and asked the U.S. Department of State to help.
On Wednesday, Jeffries said it worked: “All fees have been waived consistent with official policy.” Evora is now set to watch Cape Verde play Uruguay at 6 p.m. Sunday at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida.
There was one wrinkle in all of this. A State Department official said there was no record of Evora ever applying for a visa, and that the bond is waived anyway for relatives of World Cup players: “All relatives of players are eligible for visa bond waivers, and the Department is actively reaching out to this player’s family to assist with visa services.” It’s unclear if the $15,000 bond deterred Evora from applying for a visa in the first place.
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How the visa bond works
The bond comes from a U.S. Department of State pilot program that started in August 2025 and now covers 50 countries, Cape Verde among them. If you hold a passport from one of those countries and you’re approved for a B-1/B-2 visitor visa — the standard tourist or business visa — a consular officer can require you to post a bond of $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 before the visa is issued.
It works like a deposit. You pay it through the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Pay.gov system, and you get the full amount back if you follow the rules — don’t overstay and enter and exit through a commercial airport (not by land or sea). The administration says the program targets countries with high visa-overstay rates to push travelers to leave when they’re supposed to.
For the World Cup, the State Department waived the bond for players, their staff and their immediate relatives, plus fans who bought tickets and signed up through FIFA’s scheduling system by April 15.
Why “refundable” doesn’t make it affordable
A refund only helps if you had the cash to begin with. To post a $15,000 bond, you need that money sitting in an account, tied up for the length of your trip, on top of airfare, the visa fee and other travel expenses.
Run that against Cape Verde. The country’s economic output is about $5,192 a person, according to World Bank data. A $15,000 bond is nearly three times that. Even the lowest tier, $5,000, is close to a full year’s worth of economic output. Locking up that kind of money (cash you’d see again only after the trip is over) is out of reach for most families there, and that is where the trip ends.
If your family is the one making the trip
If you or a relative are traveling to the U.S. from one of the 50 listed countries (for the World Cup or anything else), you should know a few things.
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Check whether a waiver covers you. World Cup players’ relatives are exempt, and so were fans who bought tickets and registered with FIFA by the April 15 cutoff date. The full country list and the waiver rules is on the State Department’s travel site.
Treat the bond as locked-up cash. If a consular officer sets your bond at $10,000, plan for that money to be unavailable for the length of your trip, refunded only after you’ve left the country on time and the government records your exit.
Pay only through the official channel. The State Department warns applicants to post the bond solely through the Pay.gov link a consular officer provides, so make sure you don’t send it through a third-party site, or it could be unrecoverable. Don’t post anything until an officer directs you to.
The program is still a pilot, set to run through August 5, 2026, so the country list and the rules can change before then. For Evora, none of that matters now. She’ll be in the stands in Miami on Sunday, watching the son she had proudly said no one would score on. “I said that no ball would enter his goal, and that is exactly what happened,” she said.
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Godwin Oluponmile is a content specialist, SEO strategist and copywriter with seven years of expertise in finance, Web 3.0, B2B SaaS and technology. His work has been featured in publications such as Entrepreneur, HackerNoon, Blocktelegraph and Benzinga.
