USCIS Presumption of Fraud Stymies Legitimate Marriage Cases

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.