[aikinai]

As an American with a foreign-spouse who went through the green card application long before Trump, these stories are heart-breaking but also what I expected. I guess these couples and lawyers were just counting on lax enforcement? But this was never allowed.

The article is very light on details, but implies all of these spouses travelled to the US on a visa waiver (or similar) and then applied for a green card. Entering the US on most visas includes the assertion that you have no intent to immigrate. If you happen to already be in the US when you fall in love, get married, and apply to stay, that's when you're allowed to overstay during your pending application.

As far as I can tell from the article, it appears all of these people committed immigration fraud by entering on non-immigrant visas with clear intent to immigrate. Given that they're almost certainly upstanding people who intended to do the right thing, I think they could safely be asked to leave and apply correctly without the forceful detention, but they are technically in the wrong. What they did is specifically something I knew not to do and went through great pains to avoid.

The immigration processes for legitimate foreign spouses are Kafkaesque and absolutely need to be overhauled. It shouldn't be easier to come in illegally than through legitimate marriage. But in the meantime, people also can't circumvent the existing laws and then act flabbergasted when called on it.

I really do feel terrible for these couples caught up in it, especially since it seems their lawyers misled them.

[mikelward]

The article says "temporary visas", not visa waivers. It also says "They had already been granted employment authorization". But I agree more details would be helpful.

[aikinai]

It's extremely unlikely a journalist this haphazard is going to differentiate between a visa waiver and a temporary visa. Obviously some came on other visa if they could work, but it doesn't matter anyway; any non-immigrant visa you enter with will include the requirement that you have no intent to immigrate.

The only options are to be lucky enough to have decided to get married and immigrate after you were already in the US, or to do the application from overseas.

[jackjeff]

So the right process is to request for a K1 fiancé visa which takes over a year?!

I can see why people were tempted to cut corners, especially given past tolerance…

[aikinai]

Yes, exactly. Your legal options are to either remain separated for one or two years while you wait, or the American can immigrate to the spouse’s country and wait there (since almost every other country is easier to immigrate to).

It's an inhumane system, but as someone heavily impacted by US immigration policy, I'd much prefer they enforce the laws evenly and then fix them where they're broken rather than disadvantaging everyone going through the legal process while those that cheat get to jump ahead.

[tpmoney]

> I can see why people were tempted to cut corners, especially given past tolerance…

Which is one of the reasons that the pre-trump executive orders that granted leniency and amnesty at times were all terrible terrible things to do. We really have a problem in this country where we've decided that the laws suck, but we don't want to do the hard part of changing the law, so we just decide to ignore it. Until at some point someone comes along and decides to enforce the law and now a whole bunch of people who were acting on the de facto state of the law now have to deal with the consequences of the de jure state of the law.

Immigration is a place we've done this a lot, but things like the status of marijuana across the country is also predicated on this sort of arbitrary non-enforcement of the law. Obviously the states are not obligated to enforce federal law, but the feds absolutely can. The feds could raid every marijuana dispensary in the country and take them all down with barely a hiccup, at least from a legality standpoint. Yet they don't because we have decided to arbitrarily not enforce the law, even if we haven't changed the law.

I had really hoped after Trump's first term, we would have seen a real awakening to the amount of things that are allowed only because we don't actually enforce the laws that are on the books, and a real push to both fix the laws and roll back the abuses of executive power like this. But we didn't seem to learn that lesson, and sadly it doesn't look like that lesson is going to be learned this time either.