Immigration lawyers are warning that federal agencies are increasingly skeptical when migrants claim to have legitimate marriages with Americans.
The policy shift comes after President Donald Trump’s deputies began cracking down on rising rates of marriage-related visa fraud by migrants who pay Americans for temporary marriages.
While marrying a U.S. citizen has never been a locked-in guarantee that a migrant would be issued a green card, marriages have previously offered a huge boost to a migrant’s request for legal status. But that may be changing as immigration attorneys are finding that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) are giving such marriages much closer scrutiny than ever before.
Immigration attorney Brad Bernstein of Spar & Bernstein is warning his clients that marrying a U.S. citizen is no longer the near-guarantee of legal residence for foreign nationals, NDTV reported.
One new wrinkle in requests for marriage-related green cards is residency. The Trump administration is prioritizing a shared domicile for the migrant and the U.S. citizen, a requirement that was not prioritized in the past. Bernstein says.
“Immigration officers do not care why you live apart, and they do not care if it’s for work, school, money, or convenience,” the attorney added.
“So, if you’re not living in the same house every day, immigration is going to start questioning the marriage. And once they question it, they’re investigating, and once they come knocking on your door, they’re looking to deny you. So, if you want a marriage green card, you live together. Period,” he explained.
USCIS has warned migrants that a marriage to a U.S. citizen has to be real, not just an arrangement of convenience. And the agency will deny green cards to those who married with “no good faith, intent to live together as spouses and intended to circumvent immigration laws.”
In November, the Trump administration even suggested that migrants who already hold green cards could find their status reexamined and reassessed.
In a message posted on Thanksgiving Day, USCIS Director Joseph Edlow announced, “At the direction of @POTUS, I have directed a full scale, rigorous reexamination of every Green Card for every alien from every country of concern.”
“The protection of this country and of the American people remains paramount, and the American people will not bear the cost of the prior administration’s reckless resettlement policies. American safety is non-negotiable,” he continued.
The administration also canceled the diversity visa lottery program, which brings some 500,000 migrants to the U.S. annually, after Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente was arrested and charged with carrying out the deadly shootings at Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Valente had been awarded his legal status in the 2017 annual lottery.
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