The Risks of Trying to Outsmart The USCIS Officer
While marrying a U.S citizen is the easiest and quickest path for a foreign national to gain permanent residency status in the United States, there are still many misconceptions as to how easy it is to obtain a green card through marriage.
Many people mistakenly believe that all they have to do is pick up their marriage certificate at their local city hall, file their immigration petition, answer a few questions at a green card interview, and then, like magic, the green card will arrive in the mail.
One of the reasons for this misconception is that many would-be green card petitioners have heard stories of over-worked immigration officers dealing with more immigration cases than they can possibly handle. Hence, there is little time to pay too much attention to the millions of green card applicants that pass through the immigration system every year.
It is certainly true that that the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has seen a tremendous increase in the number of green card applications being submitted every year. But it is also true that since the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and continuing with a series of terrorist plots that were thwarted such as the plot to bomb New York City landmarks a few months later and the Millennium Plot to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport in 1997, and, of course, the attack on 9/11, immigration has become a national security issue.
Most of the terrorists involved in these plots and attacks on American soil exploited the U.S immigration system in some way. Some of them entered as students, businessmen, or tourists, but many also married American citizens so they could obtain legal permanent status, i.e., a green card. This was especially true for the conspirators of the plot to bomb several New York City landmarks in 1993. Out of the eleven terrorists involved in this plot, nine had at one time or another married an American citizen to obtain permanent residency status.
Because of this exploitation of the immigration system to enter the country and possibly plot another terrorist attack, the USCIS is not in the business of rubber-stamping any marriage-based green card applications that come their way, regardless of how much in love the married couple might appear. No USCIS officer wants to have the burden knowing that he or she was the one who approved the petition of someone who latercommitted a terrorist act or some other violent crime.
What this means for you, the innocent U.S citizen or foreign national who is married and needs a green card in order to keep your marriage together, is that you need to convince the USCIS officer that your marriage is legitimate. This will require you to document everything about your marriage, your living arrangements, your financial records, your relationship before the marriage, anything that proves that your marriage is bona fide.
If you fail to convince the USCIS officer at the green card interview that you and your spouse are not really a couple in love, but are merely trying your hand at obtaining a green card and all the benefits it bestows, then both of you will quickly find yourselves in what is known as a Stokes interview, or fraud interview. In this interview the two of you are separated and asked an identical set of very personal and probing questions designed to see how well you know your spouse. After you answer these very personal, even trivial, questions regarding your marriage and the relationship that preceded it, without your spouse present, then they repeat the same questions to the other spouse to see if the answers match.
And don’t think this can only happen to married couples that have only gotten married with the green card in mind. Perfectly innocent couples completely in love can find themselves unexpectedly thrown into a fraud interview because they said something or answered a question in a way that raised the suspicions of the interviewing officer. And if they haven’t prepared for such an interview they are in deep trouble.
The questions asked at such an interview are normally all about the minutia of your married life; what color is the comforter on your bed? what does your wife have for breakfast, etc. These are not the types of questions one can easily guess at, and even if you could the stakes are way too high to even try. Unlike, say, a high school English test you couldn’t take because you were sick, there are no make-up tests or do-overs when it comes to the green card interview.
So while the USCIS does its best to screen out those fraudulent couples that do, in fact, wish to exploit the immigration laws of our country for their own criminal benefit, the sad reality is that every married couple that sits before a USCIS officer is automatically viewed with suspicion and scrutiny. This is simply the job of the USCIS officer, to try to spot the lying couples from the honest ones. Unfortunately, sometimes the honest ones get mistakenly thrown in with the dishonest ones because they were unable to convince the officer of the legitimacy of their marriage.
So if even honest couples can sometimes get caught in the net with dishonest ones, it should be a lesson to any couples even considering trying their luck in a sham marriage, to think again. The USCIS officers have made their living spotting fraudulent marriages for years and given the severe penalties and consequences of what happens to those couples who attempt it, one wonders why they would even try.
