Officials crack down on green-card marriages

Long, expensive fact-checking process
Within two years of the wedding, husband and wife are called in to be interviewed separately by an immigration officer who establishes whether the marriage is bona fide and, if so, grants a green card. The interviewer can ask anything: how they met, which side of the bed a spouse sleeps on, the color of his or her toothbrush.

While the process is long and expensive at about $5,000, it is, in many cases, easier than getting a green card through an employer. Nearly 260,000 spouses of U.S. citizens became permanent residents in 2005, up from fewer than 185,000 in 2003, according to the government.

Two especially large rings were broken up over the summer in Utah’s Salt Lake County and New York City. In New York, a former immigration officer and his sister are accused of making more than $1 million over four years by providing hundreds of fake marriage documents and paying U.S. citizens to enter into sham marriages with foreigners.

Paid to travel
In Utah, 24 people — most of them naturalized U.S. citizens from Vietnam — were charged with paying at least 46 U.S. citizens as much as $10,000 each to travel to Vietnam to marry Vietnamese people. The foreigners were charged $30,000 each.

The organizers took care of the smallest details: They made “couples” change their clothes over and over for a succession of pictures that would give the appearance of long-term relationships, wrote backdated “love letters,” even bought a wedding ring for a couple who met 20 minutes before the ceremony, prosecutors say.

While some immigrants who enter into sham marriages might only want a better life in the U.S., others can exploit their green cards to move around freely and commit crimes, and even acts of terrorism, law enforcement authorities say.

“People may have gotten away with it in the past. But it’s a much higher risk to participate in immigration crime than ever before,” said Dustin Pead, the federal prosecutor in the Utah case.

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