U.S. immigration law drives husband, wife apart

U.S. man's Mexican wife forced to leave country

Daniel González
The Arizona Republic
Feb. 17, 2008 12:34 AM

EL NACIMIENTO, Mexico -
Brown, 44, lives in Mesa. Carrillo, 29, lives in Mexico, staying with her parents in the village where she grew up. She is raising Bryan, a U.S. citizen who turned 3 in December.

As the Browns' case shows, the days when illegal immigrants could marry U.S. citizens and easily get green cards are long over. In 1996, Congress passed a law that made it much tougher for illegal immigrants who marry U.S. citizens to acquire legal status, part of an effort to crack down on illegal immigration and sham marriages.

To apply, illegal immigrants must now leave the country first. But once they do, they risk being barred from re-entering the U.S. for up to 10 years unless they can prove that the separation would create an extreme hardship for the U.S. citizen spouse.

More than a decade after the law went into effect, Americans remain largely unaware of the tougher rules, which even when followed can have disastrous results, as the Browns discovered.

Let's see - she entered the country illegally, violating US sovereignty and federal law. She was illegally employed by a defense contractor, obviously lying on her application and providing false documents. He knew she was illegally in the country and married her anyway, being complicit in the falsifying of records for the marriage to take place. Just how many laws did she break? How many did he violate that should disqualify him from his job with Boeing? I seem to remember a Border Patrol agent going to jail for marrying and harboring an illegal. Sorry, it is not the U.S. immigration law that is separating this "poor family" but their own blatant disregard for the laws of the nation, thinking that the law applies to everyone else but not them. No sympathy for the overtly stupid! -mm