My mother’s travel situation due to the pandemic. Help?

Hey everyone, I’m really desperate and tired of hearing different things from everyone I called - USCIS, and different CBP offices at different airports all tell me different things and we’re very confused.

My mother was here last year to visit me and my brother (we were both F-1 visa holders then, my mother has a tourist visa). She was supposed to stay only for 6 months, as usual for a tourist visa, but her flight got cancelled the day before she was supposed to board due to COVID. Then all the other flights to our country started getting cancelled one by one within the next few hours, so we decided that she was not going back any time soon and we should apply for an extension on her stay. We filed the paperwork on the USCIS website, paid the fees, and started waiting for the interview/fingerprint date.

Before we were given a date for the fingerprints, flights started opening back up, and my mother started thinking about going back. There were limited seats on each flight and only one flight per week with people buying/reserving tickets through their connections and relatives before anyone else. We talked to our doctor in our home country and he advised my mom not to travel so soon due to her conditions (she has Type-2 Diabetes and heart problems, so she’s high risk), and my mom agreed and decided to stay out until her fingerprint date.

Then my grandmother got hospitalized and had to get emergency surgery.

My mother has two other siblings but one of them is unemployed and in no condition to take care of his mother due to his own health issues, and her sister lives in the UK. So, my mother is the primary caregiver for her mother, and she had to go back to be with her through the surgery/hospitalization process. We sent in a withdrawal letter to USCIS to withdraw her application for the extension, and got approved for the approval, so she left the country.

She still has an active visa, and we thought she hadn’t broken any laws because we did all our applications in a timely manner and it wasn’t like it was something we could control anyway because there were no flights available for her to leave the country on. I checked the I-94 website with her info, and I am able to get traveler’s info but not able to get travel history, it just says “no records” when I click Travel History.

Now we’re worried she won’t be let back into the country, and we’ve heard many different things:

• Some said she’ll be fine as long as she provides proof that she did everything in a timely manner and left the country when she could. Not attending the fingerprint appointment wouldn’t matter because she sent a letter of withdrawal before the date.

• Some said she has to go to the US embassy in our home country and show our proof documents to them to get a travel waiver. The US embassies in my home country have been non-functional for over a year now, the buildings are empty, nobody’s working.

• Some said there is no way she’s coming back in because “an overstay is an overstay”, which sounds ridiculous to me because, if that’s the case, why is an extension application even a thing??

• Some said she’d get taken in by the CBP and put in a holding cell (???) and possibly sent to federal prison, which sounds even more ridiculous (this was a new law graduate who said this).

So, we don’t know what to think or who to believe anymore. Any input is appreciated, thank you.