Marriage Fraud Perpetrated by Terrorists and Criminals

By Michael Cutler

A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by a reporter from the Jamaican Gleaner, a prominent newspaper that is published in the Jamaica, West Indies for an article about the issue of marriage fraud. They interviewed me, as well Steve Camarota, the director of research and an analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, the Washington-based think tank with which I have been associated for several years.

This issue is of great concern to me, having served as an adjudications officer who conducted interviews to determine if aliens should be granted resident alien status as a result of being married to United States citizens or resident aliens. I was assigned to this position temporarily for approximately one year in the mid 1970's, just before I became a special agent of the former INS. Additionally, I spent several years, as a special agent, assigned to the Frauds Unit of the Investigations Branch of the New York office of the former INS where among the areas of concern that I became involved with was the issue of marriage fraud and the organizations that facilitated fraud marriages and other fraud schemes employed by aliens who wanted to circumvent the immigration laws.

Today's USA Today reported on the guilty plea a marriage arranger entered in federal court for having arranged numerous fraud marriages between United States citizens and citizens of Ghana. The article further notes that recently ICE has focused on investigating and apprehending additional individuals who are involved in marriage fraud schemes to enable aliens to circumvent the immigration laws. As is noted in the article, this sort of fraud has serious national security implications. Janice Kephart, former counsel to the 9-11 Commission, conducted a study of fraud and the terrorists who have attacked our nation on behalf of the Center for Immigration Studies. She found a number of the terrorists who have operated in the United States utilized marriage fraud as one of the mechanisms by which they were able to embed themselves in our country, or 'hide in plain sight." This should make it clear that immigration benefit fraud represents a critical area of vulnerability to the immigration system and, consequently national security.

Once an alien succeeds in acquiring resident alien status and receives a so-called "green card," or really hits the 'jackpot' and is naturalized, that alien is able to become a legal member of the community in which he lives, in the United States. Through this process, a naturalized citizen can take any job he/she is qualified to take and even, potentially acquire a security clearance and secure a job at a sensitive facility such as an airport, military base or power plant.

When an alien naturalizes and embraces the United States and participates in the "American Dream," both the naturalized citizen and our nation benefits. When, however, an alien acquires immigration benefits through fraud and deception, the security of the system is breached and it leaves the door open to criminals and terrorists gaming the system to embed themselves in our country and potentially becoming a "sleeper agent" who awaits instructions to participate in an attack against our nation.

The article in the newspaper in Jamaica should make it clear that people around the world are paying attention to the measures our nation takes or fails to take to secure the immigration system. That is why when the President talks about guest worker amnesty, the rate of illegal immigration accelerates as aliens who are paying attention to the President and other political "leaders" of the United States where the issues of immigration and border security are concerned.

Aliens who want to come to the United States either legally or illegally are certainly paying attention to our government. It is time our government paid attention to them. The creation of the ICE fraud task forces around the United States, cited in the article, represents a step in the right direction and I have been told that some of the impetus behind the creation of these task forces came from my Congressional testimony. This is something that I find personally gratifying, however, considering the huge numbers of applications for various immigration benefits, I believe that ICE needs to have many more special agents who would focus on immigration fraud, both fraud schemes as well as fraudulent documents. It is also essential that these agents receive proper training including foreign language training and training in the identification of counterfeit and altered documents. The fact of the matter is that immigration benefit fraud is a widespread problem that is not being adequately addressed because there are simply far too few agents to conduct these critical investigations.

I have made reference to the GAO report that was issued on March 10 of this year that addressed the severity of immigration benefit fraud. James Sensenbrenner, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee issued a press release about that report.

That press release also contains a link to the actual report, and it is a report that is of critical significance. Immigration benefit fraud is certainly one of the major "dots" that were not connected prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001 and remains a "dot" that is not really being addressed the way it needs to be in order to secure our nation against criminals and terrorists who understand how important it is for them to "game" the system as a part of the embedding process.

Lead, follow or get out of the way!

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