She wanted love and a baby. She was an employed U.S. citizen, a resident of the Houston area, and of Egyptian descent.
He wanted a U.S. green card, had been divorced twice in Egypt, and was in the U.S. on a student visa. He, her divorce papers state, has a low sperm-count and at least one of his divorces in Egypt related to his homosexual tendencies. (He, she says, kept both of those matters secret from her prior to the marriage.)
They are distant relatives. They married and on a post-marriage trip to Egypt he refused to introduce her to members of his family. They parted, and his current immigration status is not known to her (and not revealed, of course, by the government.)
He has filed a form I-751 as a self-petitioning immediate relative, and thus seeks a green card as a result of his claim that he (at 5’ 10’’ and 300 pounds) had been abused by her (at 5’ 4’’ and 145 pounds). Alternatively, he may have an H-1B visa for his job as a math teacher in a Texas high school; or maybe he has no legal status at all. (The school district in question is known to have used the H-1B system in the past.)
There may well have been a period, after the two-year conditional green card that one gets with a marriage to a citizen had lapsed but before he secured the H-1B, in which he was in illegal status. He also has had, she said, a part-time teaching job at a West Texas college; if so that hiring either related to his having a green card or was an illegal act. (The college is known to me, and it has no record of using the H-1B program, which it could have done.)
She has subsequently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
At the moment they are in divorce court; he wants to keep the new car she bought for him, and wants her to keep up the car payments, wants her to pay his overdue lawyer’s bills, and is seeking other funds from her as well. She wants a walk-away divorce in which no moneys change hands: after all, whatever property she owns had nothing to do with any financial contributions from him. (There is no child in this case.)
Their names are irrelevant to the story, but we have her permission to share them with a responsible journalist or a congressional committee.
This is just one more of the many stories we at CIS hear from time to time about how many aliens a year secure their green cards as “self-petitioning spouses.” This is a process, reported earlier, in which the citizen is often given no chance by DHS to rebut the charges of abuse and the alien often gets a green card regardless of the evidence in the case.
The specifics of this case – that he has homosexual tendencies, that he is not only from her parents’ home country but a distant relative, and that his “abuse” allegations sound phony – are elements we hear frequently from citizens in this situation.
