Rockford, IL: Marriage fraud has become a growing concern for United States Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS). Many cases of sham marriage have come to light in recent years, such as the large ring of organized marriage fraud for which about 100 people were charged in Houston, TX, last year.
This problem takes many forms, some of which have caused much emotional and financial damage to many Americans citizens.
Auguste is one such victim. His story of his marriage began when he was visiting the Dominican Republic to attend his mother’s funeral.
The relationship blossomed, and Auguste was smitten with a young, beautiful Haitian girl who seemed eager to start living with Auguste. The couple came to the US with her travelling under a K-1 Fiancée Visa and got married in spring 2016.
Auguste soon applied for his new wife’s citizenship, planning to live together forever. However, by August 2017, in a little over a year, the beautiful dream turned into a nightmare. Auguste watched in shock as his wife called the police and accused her husband of domestic battery, for which the man was arrested and jailed.
Just two days after that phone call to the police, she also filed for an Emergence Order of Protection against her jailed husband and, within months, filed for divorce. By this time, she was several months pregnant with another man’s child, as investigations from the highly respected marriage fraud investigator John Sampson discovered.
Auguste’s story is just one of many, and the increasing incidents of marriage fraud involving the I-751 are raising important questions about the unfortunate and unintended consequences of VAWA.
While VAWA was included into the legislation to duly increase legal protection for female victims of domestic violence, the law is actively used by female immigrants to label their American spouses as violent individuals who abuse their wives.
If they can convince the VAWA unit of USCIS in Vermont that they have been abused, the state immediately frees them from the obligation of living with their US citizen spouse for a specified period of 2 years after the wedding and speeds up their independent US citizenship.
There is a growing need for concerned authorities to elevate the level of credible evidence when stories such as the one stated above come to light. The law must also be protected against abuse from unscrupulous individuals who cause unwitting US citizens like Auguste a lot of pain and infamy.
Concluding his investigation of the case, John Sampson from CSI Consulting LLC states in his report that “given the totality of the circumstances, that SUBJECT married SOURCE (Auguste) solely for the purpose of entering the United States and without any intention of establishing a life with SOURCE (Auguste).”