My husband has a 13 year old daughter with his ex wife. The separated 12 1/2 years ago. He has been a part of his daughters life and they are VERY close, until almost 2 years ago when his ex got offered a good job in chicago, we all lived in New York. When she decided to leave she did not discuss it with him first, she just told him , we're moving to chicago next month. He knew this was going to cause problems, so he went to family court in NY and he had to give her permission to leave the state, in turn she agreed to 9-3day weekends a year and 2 weeks in the summer. This was going well for the first 6 months, when all of a sudden she stopped returning phone calls and when he went back to family court in NY he found out she went to court in IL and filed a motion to vacate the NY order because they were now citizens of IL. The NY judge allowed IL to take over the case and the previous agreement was dismissed. The IL judge gave him 6 days a year of supervised visitation in IL, originally the visitation was to be in NY because she's the one that left the state and she comes here all the time because her family is here. He would never have agreed to let her leave the state if he knew something like this could happen. What can he do now? He can not afford to travel to IL and pay for supervised visitation, he's on disability and she and the judge know this. She's doing this out of spite because she's jealous that he and I are together for 10 years and recently got married, but she's taking it out on her daughter.

He needs an attorney. The ex probably got a smart attorney who was able to ramrod this through Illinois courts. I think he needs file in a NY court to get the Visitation order, ordered by the NY court reinstated. I can see no grounds for the Illinois court to overturn the NY visitation order.

I completely agree with scott that he needs a lawyer ASAP and a good one. It'll cost some money but generally what you get out of it is waaaaay more than you could have done on your own.