There is something puzzling about the press coverage of a marriage fraud case that recently ended in a Kansas courtroom. But, first let's look at the case itself.
Usually visa-creating marriage fraud involves:
- An alien seeking a visa by paying a citizen for a phony marriage; and
- About as much sex as a dispute between two accountants.
On August 23 a jury in Federal District Court in Wichita convicted a Jamaican woman of marriage fraud in a trial that turned both of those generalizations on their heads. Here's a quick summary of the immigration aspects:
The Alien: Shannakay Hunter, 28, a visa abuser from Jamaica, and the single mother of two children (by someone other than her husband).
The Citizen: Joshua Priest, 23, a soldier at Fort Riley in Kansas at the time of the phony marriage to Hunter and now a college student.
The Financier of the Fraud: The U.S. Treasury, via the U.S. Army's payroll program.
The Victims: All of us, both as taxpayers, and as people forced to live in a more populous country than we would be were it not for marriage fraud (and other needless expansions of immigration).
Routinely, as noted above, the alien (or sometimes the alien's family) pays a bribe to the citizen member of the "wedding" party. In this case, the savvy Hunter figured out that if she married a single soldier, he would qualify for $1,500 more a month in subsistence payments (given the presence of the two little children) according to several AP stories on the trial, such as this final one.
If the two parties had kept their illegal agreement, both would have shared the monthly $1,500 cash flow and during his tour with the Army Priest would have been allowed to live off-base (on the grounds of his marriage) and Hunter would be on the road to a green card.
But, as often is the case, they fell out with each other, and now both face the possibility of jail time.
As the AP article and court documents tell it, Priest passed along little, if any, of the extra money. Then the time came when Priest and Hunter were scheduled for an interview for her conditional residence card (the first step toward the permanent green card.)
Hunter, then living in the Bronx, decided that she needed to put some pressure on Priest to make him appear at the USCIS interview and to start paying her some money. So she made a trip to Kansas and went to his superiors in the Army and asked them to order him to go to the meeting and to start paying her the money. In the course of that meeting it became apparent that it was a fraudulent marriage. The officers told Priest (and I find this odd) to go to the USCIS meeting with Hunter; simultaneously they used the USCIS fraud tip line to alert the agency of the conspiracy.
The couple went to the interview, Priest and Hunter said they married for love, and she got her conditional residence card. The USCIS official who talked to the couple had not yet heard about the Army's tip.
Later the disclosure stimulated an investigation. Priest was hauled into court; he agreed to a plea bargain that involved him testifying against Hunter, which he did; and she, aided by a court-appointed lawyer, opted for a jury trial. The jury in the Federal District Court in Wichita found her guilty of three counts of fraud; sentencing will be later. The AP reporter, Roxana Hegeman, speculates that Hunter may be jailed first and deported later.
The conviction of Hunter took place despite the fact that her court-appointed attorney, according to the AP stories, kept attacking Priest as a liar trying to shift blame from himself to her. Priest's police record while he was in the military, not a very attractive one, was also among the court records. (Users of PACER, the federal courts' electronic data system can see it at case 6:12-cr-10065-MLB, doc 40.)
The odd funding of the fraud and the size of it (he gained $26,000 in extra pay from the Army, the equivalent of a very large marriage bribe) first attracted my attention.
As I looked a little deeper into public court records I found some information that would cause deep breathing among scandal sheet editors, something that reporter Hegeman either missed or suppressed, or perhaps her editors suppressed it. She works in strait-laced Kansas, after all.
As I mentioned earlier, sex rarely is a factor in arranged marriages; often, as Priest is quoted as saying in this case, the participants state: "I don't mix business with pleasure."
This story turned out differently. A review of the numerous pre-trial documents filed in the Hunter case, and available at the Pacer site just mentioned (doc. 46), summarizes the arguments about the sex relations, or lack thereof, between the two of them. Hunter said that she had sex with Priest numerous times; Priest said that never happened, but that she tried to seduce him.
Significantly, on an evening when Hunter was in Kansas, she was in Priest's apartment, as was Xavier Jones, a friend of Priest's. Jones was there because he was having a fight with his wife. Then, according to the motion filed by Brent I. Anderson, Assistant U.S. Attorney:
[Hunter] tried to get Joshua to have sex with her with Xavier Jones as a third participant, but he wouldn't; Joshua Priest told Xavier Jones it made no difference to him (Joshua) whether Mr. Jones had sex with [Hunter]; Joshua Priest was actually present at least part of the time Mr. Jones and [Hunter] were having sex; Mr. Jones and [Hunter] were vigorous sexual partners even though Joshua Priest was physically present in the apartment at the time …
In court filings, Anderson indicated that he wanted Jones to testify regarding the encounter just described as such testimony would support the government's position that Hunter and Priest had not slept together. Jones was on the list of witnesses that the government planned to use (see the PACER file cited above, at doc. 40).
By definition, the information above was part of the public record whether or not Jones actually testified in court — something I do not know. Ms. Hegeman's reporting in the AP accounts I read did not mention him by name, nor his adventures with Hunter.
I am puzzled why such information was not included in the AP coverage.
Did I, at my computer in Arlington, Va., know something about the trial that the AP reporter did not? Doubtful. Was this element of the story suppressed by either the reporter or her editors because of a puritanical approach to life? Maybe. Or, most disturbing of all, is the non-coverage of the Jones/Hunter activity another indication of how the mainstream press plays down unattractive stories about immigrants, even illegal ones?
We at CIS have frequently argued that marriage fraud is not merely a marriage of convenience, it is always, by definition, a marriage of criminals. In this case neither the citizen nor the alien came out of the trial appearing very attractive, as is often the case when one examines specific marriage fraud cases in detail.