Uncle Sam Unwittingly Helps Fund Immigration-Related Marriage Fraud

It's bad enough that USCIS is not as active as it should be in rooting out immigration-related marriage fraud. It is worse when the American military, albeit unwittingly, helps fund it, as a recent article in Military Times indicates.

All too often citizens — both civilians and members of the military — agree to loveless marriages with aliens so that the citizens get some money and the aliens get green cards. If the marriage is a sham, that's a violation of the federal law and if caught all concerned can go to jail and the alien is likely to be deported.

What I realized recently is that frequently it is not the alien who is paying for the lawless marriage, it is Uncle Sam, or more specifically our armed services.

It works like this: The previously single serviceman (or woman) after marrying the alien gets a larger monthly paycheck (by $1,500 a month or more) by claiming a (phony) dependent, the new spouse. The service member also gets to live off-base instead of in the barracks.

The financial reward for this illicit activity is much better if the spouse is an alien, rather than another citizen. In the latter case, the spouse would want half the extra money, but if the spouse is an alien seeking legal status, the green card is the reward, so the service member gets to keep all the ill-gotten gains (except, in some cases, payments to the ring-leader.)

The Supreme Court's decision against the Defense of Marriage Act (though it does not relate directly to marriage fraud) reminded me of that subject and I poked around a little on Google the other day to see what I could find about sham marriages in the military.

It was an interesting haul. Drawn from it are a couple of multiple-marriage Navy cases, two smaller-scale Army cases, and a telling account of the not-very-interested response of the Marines to this problem at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Among the cases: A few weeks ago the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Richmond, Va., confirmed the conviction and the four-year sentence of a sailor, a naturalized citizen originally from Grenada, Jermar Jones, for 11 counts dealing with both marriage fraud and the illegal receipt by various sailors of dependency benefits, according to an AP report. Jones was the ringleader of a group of sailors on the massive amphibious assault ship the USS Kearsarge who married aliens — some from Grenada — in order to obtain $134,000 in illegal basic allowances for housing (BAHs). Ten people were named in the main indictment and in related ones. The site of the criminal activity was Norfolk.

The Jones case seemed to be a slightly less dramatic sequel to another similar, larger case that had erupted a couple of years earlier at the same base. That one involved 17 defendants, most of whom were from the USS Iwo Jima, another large amphibious assault vessel, but this time the ringleader was a Russian-born American sailor, and the aliens were primarily Russian women, according to this news account.

The two Army cases encountered were both smaller-scale than the Navy schemes; but there were similarities: one involved another Carribean alien (from Jamaica), and the other a pair of naturalized soldiers with Russian roots.

The Jamaican case, which involved a single phony marriage and both green card and Army dependent benefits fraud, was previously reported in a CIS blog.

The Army/Russian case, which dates back a couple of years, involved a pair of ethnic Russian brothers from Kazakhstan (a former USSR republic) who had become U.S. soldiers. Based at Fort Bragg, they arranged three sham marriages, which, in turn, generated more than $200,000 in fraudulent housing benefits over a three-year period, according to the Raleigh News & Observer.

The one Marine case that popped up on Google related to at least eight phony marriages to Ghanaian women, each involving the green card-and-housing-benefits deal.

The report on the Marine case in the Military Times article cited above carried the discouraging headline "Investigators don't actively pursue fraud marriages". At this time, according to a spokesperson as Camp Lejeune the Marines are "not working any investigation related to this type of fraud, nor are any proactive operations being conducted in search of such activity."

The publication reported a similar situation at Camp Pendleton, the Marine base in California.

That's a shame because such investigations, when successful, simultaneously reduce military expenditures and help enforce the immigration law.

Incidentally, while the vast majority of illegal aliens in the nation are of Hispanic descent, there have been no mentions of them in this blog, and there's a reason for that. A large portion of the Hispanic illegals came to the United States by illicitly crossing the border; the immigration law makes it relatively easy for a visa abuser to get legal status by marrying a legal resident of the United States, but does not extend the same opportunities to those who enter without inspection (EWIs).

Subscribers to PACER, the federal courts electronic database, can read the indictment in the Grenada-related case at 2:11-cr-00083-MSD-LRL, document 3, and the one involving the Russians and the sailors at 2:10-cr-00068-RAJ-DEM, again document 3; both were filed in the Eastern District of Virginia.