USCIS Presumption of Fraud Stymies Legitimate Marriage Cases

Published December 01, 2008 @ 05:00AM PT

From the St. Petersburg Times (via BIB) comes the all-too-common story of the hell that a U.S. citizen and his foreign-born wife went through in trying to prove to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that their marriage wasn't fraudulent.

The ordeal began one August morning two years ago when Nelly and Jeff drove to the offices of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in Tampa. They were there for an interview, the last step before Nelly could obtain her permanent residency, or green card.

Jeff was a native Floridian with a boom box plastered with stickers telling foreigners to speak English. Nelly was from Peru with a mind for business. They met when Jeff bought a banana from Nelly at the flea market. She liked that he let her make business decisions. Jeff, hard working and reserved, was happy to let Nelly do the talking.

At the immigration offices that day, the couple did not know about a nationwide crackdown on fraud marriages. Immigration officials say immigrants pay Americans $10,000 to $35,000 to marry them until green cards come through.

Agents separated and grilled them with questions. Jeff bungled his answers about the couple's address and phone number. They were living with Nelly's sister and he never called the house, he explained.

The agent told Jeff to come clean, he remembers. Jeff grew combative. The agent denied Nelly's application.

This happens All. The. Time.

Many U.S. citizen spouses assume they'll be treated with some level of courtesy, or at least given a chance to argue their case to the officer.

Veterans of the armed forces petitioning for their foreign-born spouses sometimes assume their contributions to the military will carry some weight--or again, at least a certain level of respect.

Wrong on both counts.

Interracial couples, couples with language or cultural differences, couples with a significant difference in age-all face higher scrutiny. Some U.S. citizens assume that an officer will not judge the validity of the marriage on the basis of the race of the husband and wife. Wrong again.

USCIS may deny that its officers utilize criteria like race or nationality to make decisions about the validity of a marriage, but USCIS officials will freely admit (as they have to me) that adjudications officers are under no obligation whatsoever to justify a denial to the applicants. "Yes" or "no" is all they have to tell you. So what is to prevent an officer from denying a case because the marriage is an interracial one? No one would ever know. And, if he is feeling magnanimous, the officer can always proffer the excuse that "documentation was insufficient."

USCIS will have a harder time denying that adjudications officers are getting pressure from their supervisors to deny more cases. If you go in for your spousal green card interview and the adjudications officer assigned to your case is a little low on his or her quota of denials for that month, expect more probing questions and a more skeptical attitude. Don't be too surprised when your case gets denied and your spouse ends up in removal proceedings.

Part of the problem is that case loads are too high and officers don't have the time to make a proper assessment of the marriage. Low-income applicants are placed at a disadvantage because even the U.S. citizen spouse may live much of his or her life "undocumented"-sans health insurance, no lease or utility bills because they are living with relatives, etc. Officers put a premium on documents like these that can prove a couple is married and living together. Finally, many officers work from a presumption of fraud that taints their judgment from the outset.

There are many adjudications officers who are honest and dedicated to their work. But the system vests so much discretion in adjudications officers that egregious abuses like this one are bound to occur.

I wrote more about this problematic process earlier this year:

The government views a failed marriage as validation that its anti-fraud procedures have succeeded. So much for family-friendly policies. . . .

I understand that the government has a legitimate interest in combating marriage fraud. But I would hope that the procedures they would implement for detecting fraud would be effective, efficient, and fair. They are anything but. At the end of the day, a married couple's chances of succeeding in a green card application have more to do with race, nationality, and socioeconomic status than they do with the underlying merits of the case. . . .

USCIS needs to overhaul the standards it sets for its employees and the policies and procedures it implements under executive authority. But more importantly, as we've seen time after time with the Bush executive branch, the situation calls for meaningful oversight and constraint by Congress. And Congress should review and reform the immigration laws to make them more effective and less unjust. Abuses like those in the Baichu case [USCIS officer coerced sexual favors from a green card applicant, in the process destroying her marriage and chances for a marriage-based green card] are bound to occur with such a vulnerable population--a vulnerability that has been consciously created and legislated by anti-immigrant groups in the stated attempt to make life so miserable for them here that they leave of their own accord.

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Comments (15)

I just visited this site for the first time, and I totally agree that legal immigrants should be welcomed to the USA, but illegal is illegal. Deport them all, from where ever they come from, and tell them to follow the rules of legal immigration, and we will welcome them with open arms. We do need immigration reform now. Using the proven E-Verify system as a tool, and require for all employers to run data checks on employess and people searching for work. No pass, no job. This would employ many of the unemployed working middle class families that are being outsourced. We should also clear our prisons of illegals, and send them to their homeland. We need to revise the anchor baby situation. It is like many of the loopholes that exist now for corporate America. It's just a way of getting around the system. The system is broken. We need to change. We have to think of our country, and it's legal citizens first in this rough time of change. We need to employ the legal citizens of our country, and not give any benefits to any illegals.

Posted by Chuck Kristopeit on 12/04/2008 @ 02:25AM PT
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The bottom line here is and always will be the force behind illegal immigration. The US Chamber of commerce pumps millions into lobbying for it because businesses want cheap labor they can exploit. The biggest lobbying force in the World for decades gets what it wants and the Chamber of Commerce does not speak for the average US Citizen. So the way to fix this problem as well as most of the problems in the USA is simple= Eliminate all lobbying and return to government for and by the majority of "We the People" not special interests and corporations.

Posted by Steve Pieta on 12/04/2008 @ 07:01AM PT
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Neither of you in any way addressed the specifics of my post. I've made it clear that I'm not a fan of drive-by restrictionist rants. Future comments in this vein will be deleted at my discretion.

Posted by Dave Bennion on 12/04/2008 @ 11:19AM PT
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So, your saying that our comments can only positive towards Law Breaking Illegal Immigrants???????

Posted by Mike Farnam on 12/04/2008 @ 11:31AM PT
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Great article Dave!

Posted by Claudia Olivas-Meza on 12/04/2008 @ 04:06PM PT
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"So, your saying that our comments can only positive towards Law Breaking Illegal Immigrants???????"

Do the extra question marks make the question more likely to be answered? Or act to highlight the rhetorical character of the query? Or is it a blind cry from the heart at the miserable beauty of living as sentient beings in a meaning-less universe?

Is Law Breaking Illegal Immigrants a term of art?

????????

Posted by Dave Bennion on 12/04/2008 @ 07:48PM PT
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Viewed from another perspective... I was married (or at least I thought I was) to an immigrant from Israel. This person was devisive manipulative and demonstrated a complete disregard for US law. They disappeared shortly after the wedding. There has been no contact between us since. However, I recently found out that this person is in trouble with the law. It's frank to assume that all they wanted was a "Green Card". The real concern is that they haven't been deported and they'll probably be successful at staying.

Posted by Tiki Uri on 12/06/2008 @ 12:42PM PT
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I think what David is actually saying is that this particular post is about the difficulties that US Citizens and their spouses are having to live LEGALLY in the United States. As someone who married someone from abroad herself and went through the greencard process, I can attest to how difficult the system must be for anyone who is not as privileged as others.

First, it is costly. To apply for a greencard now costs over $1,000 in fees. Secondly, the instructions for applications are very specific and challenging for an Ivy League educated native speaker of English to follow, let alone anyone whose first language is not English. Third, it is time consuming. Not everyone has the ability to visit USCIS field offices during business hours to ask guidance questions, and certainly not everyone has the finances to seek the counsel of a lawyer. Finally, although I thankfully was not required to do an interview (the 20 lbs of documents I submitted must have been sufficient), I cannot imagine how nerve-wracking it must be to 'prove' to a stranger in a few minutes that you are legitimately married to the person you have chosen to spend the rest of your life with through a series of random questions that may or may not apply to your situation.

The fault lies in many places. There are indeed so many cases of immigration fraud using the marriage greencard process, and these fraud cases cost the system time and resources that could be spent processing the hundreds of thousands of legitimate applications. However, it is definitely unfair that these fraud cases should color the decisions of the entire USCIS system. At the end of the day, USCIS officers are indeed holding the lives of many families in their hands in the decisions they make, and need to be increasingly sensitized about this.

The 'American Dream' has always been about people being able to 'make it' in this country despite their socio-economic circumstances. It has also always included immigrants who come to the U.S. for a better life. That those immigrants must suffer through a system that assumes the worst of them rather than the best of them completely dismantles that dream for so many people.

Posted by Phoebe Farag on 12/21/2008 @ 08:26AM PT
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I wish they'd make it even harder.

Posted by Mike Farnam on 01/11/2009 @ 02:20PM PT
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Great piece, Dave! it's unbelievable that an inter-national couple must undergo such scrutiny. This highlights the age-old American tradition of mistrusting immigrants, which is always sparked by ignorance and fear.

Posted by Tina Shull on 04/27/2009 @ 10:17AM PT
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Fear is the biggest problem in this country.Americans are afraid of competition by immigrants.Children of immigrants do better in school than indeginous American kids.Have you ever watched the spelling BEE on TV? Most kids on that competition have immigrants parents.

Posted by john smith on 06/08/2009 @ 06:29PM PT
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It is understandable that some have embarked on fraudulent acts to live in the United States. But my rationale is how is the scrutiny and law designed, to protect both sides from injustice. I have witnessed how the immigration has empowered citizens to subject their spouses to psychological and physical cruelty based on the unbearable process of naturalization. The questions they ask at interviews and subsequently denying the couples petition have broken several relationships that could have been a happy one. The two year conditional status is infact a brilliant idea and is enough to validate a marriage due to the statistic of divorces in our today's society. Not too many American citizens survive marriages; they tend to breakdown within few months to eight months on statistics. And if infact its a fraudulent marriage as claimed by the Marriage Fraud Amendments of 1986, it would hardly stand the test of a two year mandate to qualify for removal of condition of status. That's what I will describe as an human marriage test time period. The questions and reversed psychological tactics used to threaten couples have empowered US citizens to embark on turning their immigrant spouse into modern day slaves if approved during the two years test period, nonetheless denying status and the couples having to go through excruciating pain to prove their marriage. US spouse are now using their immigrant spouse identities to incur massive debts without a normal couple joint decision hoping they get deported anyways' what a true American dream, subjecting them to cruelty knowing that they cannot leave them because the USCIS have legalized their slaveries to their spouse in this modern day and time, this infact has a tendency of now changing what was true to false. The immigration is now affecting peoples marriage span rather than validating the marriage itself. I do believe personally that if evidence prove fraud that they out rightly should denied of any Immigration benefit, and if otherwise don't poison the mind of the couples, who already have cultural differences as an hurdle to cross in their marital life, by making the citizen spouse believe they are being deceived for the purpose of naturalization. Have you guys thought about the psychological ramification and strain you cause, when what you suspect is not what it is. The whole idea about family unity gets distorted because love naturally gets tested, but aiding a negative thought in a petitioner only but certifies the instability of unions in our today society. Every member in the society has a right to choose their own partners irrespective of background, race and age disparity (As long as they are both adults and are healthy and aware of their decisions). If a fifty year old woman/man can legally have a consensual sex with a twenty year old without legal ramification or statutory rape. Why then will their choice to have sex consensually in a marriage institution be fraudulent? If that's unacceptable then why is the permissive freedom of a man to man copulation acceptable? Why not have them have sex in front of an immigration officer" yeah I guess that's unacceptable.

Posted by Duane A on 08/18/2009 @ 03:52PM PT
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lol, that might cause a rise in applications for adjudications officer positions, at least among men.

yes i agree the whole paradigm is pretty messed up but i'm looking to cross that bridge when we get to it.

Posted by Dave Bennion on 08/21/2009 @ 12:06AM PT
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Millions have passed and survived. What makes those who fail and different beside legitamacy?

Posted by Mike Farnam on 08/21/2009 @ 07:52AM PT
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I have always thought of myself as a law abiding, very loyal, Patriotic American Citizen. I was born into a "Caucasian", Roman Catholic, Republican family. Not that any of that matters. I am now married to a wonderful guy who came here from Kenya to be afforded the experience of a Western education and is almost finished with a Doctorates in Electrical Engineering. My husband is a Muslim and he is of Arabic descent, and it may be of no surprise to anyone that he like others have made mistakes in their lifetimes. He was previously married to an American woman and was denied a green card on the premise of fraud. Well I guess I am here writing right now because I have been looking up a way to correct our current situation. We have been told by two lawyers now that there is literally no way for my husband to gain a green card because of the previous denial saying their marriage was fraud. She was white, he is not, she was 10 years his elder, she had a child from a previous relationship, she didn't change her last name to his, she didn't practice the same religion he did, and there were some discrepancies in their interview....so they were told that their marriage was fraudulent, they tried to appeal the ruling but to no avail. They ended up separated for numerous reasons. Now I find out today that there is no way for him to get a green card unless he can prove that their marriage which ended over two years ago was not fraud!!!! Isn't this an all together separate marriage and should their marraige hold any validity to whether ours is the real thing or not?! All I have to say is I cried my eyes out all the way home and I have no idea what to do...the US government should not be ruining the lives of its citizens this way!!! I love my husband and I will go where I have to with him even though it will break my heart to leave my home and my family here, but then people wonder why people hate this country....when something like this happens it doesn't take a genius to figure out why!!!! And I was a great Patriot of this country, now I seriously question whether I am or not!!!!! How can I be a great Patriot of a country, that is basically kicking me out on my A** to a third world country with my husband!!!!! Something is very, very wrong and there should be a lot of questions raised about the current immigration processes. I know illegal aliens that were able to get green cards and people who lied about thier status as refugees that got thier green cards and my husband who came to the US as a student and is going to get a doctorates in Electrical Engineering is going to be kicked out....as I said something is very wrong here!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted by Tina Al-Amoody on 09/13/2009 @ 02:27PM PT
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David is an attorney in Philadelphia, PA, where he helps immigrants to the U.S. navigate the complex immigration legal system. Views he expresses at change.org are his alone and don't represent the views or opinions of his employer, Nationalities Service Center. The information contained on this site is intended for educational and advocacy purposes only.