The stories of H4 visa holders across America are diverse, but linked by one common thread —a population of predominantly Indian women who struggled to find purpose without working. More than 80,000 women accompany their spouses to the United States every year. Before 2015, the chance of a finding a willing visa sponsor and career was slim.

"Coming here was never a part of the plan," said Neha Mahajan, who currently resides in New Jersey. Before moving to the United States, she worked as a broadcast journalist in India.

"We had everything in India," she said. "But when my husband got an opportunity here, we decided to be open to it."

Mahajan entered in 2008 on dependent status, but had to wait seven years before the Obama-era ruling would allow her to seek a work permit. She was unfamiliar with what an H4 visa would entail, scouring the USCIS website for answers before she immigrated.

"It was so jargon heavy for a normal person sitting in India. I had no idea what an H4 visa would actually do to me,"she said.

Without a job, she couldn't get a Social Security card or open a bank account. Other avenues to find work were also quickly closed off. "I wasn't able to go back to school because I couldn't take out a loan," she said. "And even if I did take one through my husband, there was no guarantee that I would be able to work after graduating and pay it back."

Her husband was employed on an H1-B, one of the most highly sought out work permits. It draws more than 100,000 applicants every year and visas are awarded by lottery. Of the 85,000 available, most are seized by workers in STEM fields . With a background in journalism, Mahajan's chances of finding a willing visa sponsor in her field were unlikely.

"The only thing that came to my mind was, 'OK, I need to start volunteering. I need to keep my skills sharp somehow,'" she said, setting off to help with marketing and promotions for film festivals across the Indian community for free over the next five years.

"I would save up whatever money I had and drive 50 miles one way just to feel like I had a sense of purpose again," she said.

Though she received her work permit in 2015, returning to the job market proved more difficult than she'd imagined, struggling to land interviews for eight months.

"No one would call me and my volunteer experiences counted for little," she said. Mahajan eventually landed a position as a reporter with TV Asia in 2018.

For others, staying at home took a greater toll.

Meghna Damani's documentary, "Hearts Suspended," traces her own hardships of coming to America — struggling with a life in small-town State College, Pennsylvania before moving to New Jersey. She produced the autobiographical work during a documentary course she'd taken at the New School to stymie the boredom of being a stay-at-home wife.

From the first scene, Damani's stance on her visa status is clear. Looking into the camera, she declares that independence was "the first thing I lost when I came to the land of the free."

She entered in 2002, long before the fight that brought awareness to the hardships of dependant spouses surfaced. Her documentary traces her arrival to the United States, focusing on the extreme loneliness and lack of purpose she felt.

"This was before the Internet, so there was no Facebook, no easy way to talk to anyone in a similar situation,"she said. "Calling my family home in India was extremely expensive. I began to feel extremely guilty about not doing anything, that I was a burden to my husband and a family that had invested so much in my education."

The difficulties convincing employers to sponsor her are also captured on film. Damani had worked in the marketing world in India, but most media companies told her that there "were strict policies against visa sponsorship for foreign nationals."

After more than five years of jobs rejections and loneliness, her mental health declined critically, even considered ending her life.

She credits finding faith and filmmaking to saving her. Putting together the documentary helped her confront many things she'd wanted to deny as the trailing spouse in her marriage, "being a victim and losing my self-confidence."

Though the documentary was met with praise, it encountered its share of criticism. Damani is now a U.S. citizen, but admits she still deals with misrepresentations of women on work permits as privileged and ungrateful. The comments section below YouTube film complain of women who "whine" and "should go back to India if they're unhappy here."

"My harshest critics have been from India," she said."People back home would tell me that I should just be grateful to be here."

The film eventually ended up gaining traction, screening in New York and on Indian news channels. Its biggest impact occurred when it was screened in Washington, D.C., in front of government representatives and other White House officials.

"People were coming up to me and telling me this was an eye-opener,"she said. "That they worked with numbers every day, but now they got to see a human voice behind them and understand their responsibility towards them."

Damani's documentary inspired others to share their stories during the public comment period that led to approval of the special work permits for spouses in 2015.

"The USCIS team said they received an unprecedented number of comments in support of allowing the H4 EAD," she said. "There were almost 14,000 posted."

Today, that work has come full circle, as Damani and others embark on another intensive, multimedia campaign to save the work permit.