Marriage used to prevent deportation. Not anymore.
They had shown the immigration officer their proof — the eight years of Facebook photos, their 5-year-old son’s birth certificate, the letters from relatives and friends affirming their commitment — and now they were so close, Karah de Oliveira thought, so nearly a normal couple.
Thirteen years after her husband was ordered deported back to his native Brazil, the official recognition of their marriage would bring him within a few signatures of being able to call himself an American. With legal papers, they could buy a house and get a bank loan. He could board a plane. They could take their son to Disney World.
Then the officer reappeared. “I’ve got some good news and some bad news,” he said. “The good news is, I’m going to approve your application. Clearly, your marriage is real. The bad news is, ICE is here, and they want to speak with you.”
ICE was Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency charged with arresting and deporting unauthorized immigrants — including, for the moment, Fabiano de Oliveira. In a back room of the immigration office in Lawrence, Mass., two agents were waiting with handcuffs. Her husband was apologizing, saying he was sorry for putting her through all of this. Karah de Oliveira kissed him goodbye. “I’ll do whatever I can to get you out,” she said.
For decades, marriage to a U.S. citizen has been a virtual guarantee of legal residency, the main hurdle being proof that the relationship is legitimate. But with the Trump administration in fierce pursuit of unauthorized immigrants across the country, many who were ordered deported years ago are finding that jobs, home and family are no longer a defense — not even for those who have married Americans.
As the Trump administration arrests thousands of immigrants with no criminal history and reshapes the prospects of even legal immigrants — an overdue corrective, officials say, to the lenient policies of the past — many who have lived without papers for years are urgently seeking legal status by way of a parent, adult child or spouse who is already a citizen or permanent resident.
In a growing number of cases, however, immigrants with old deportation orders never enforced are getting the go-ahead after an interview by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that handles residency and citizenship, only to be arrested by ICE.
“It’s like playing dice in Las Vegas or something,” said William Joyce, a former immigration judge who now practices immigration law in Boston. “It’s not 100 percent, but you’re playing with fire if you go to that interview. You can walk in, but you won’t be walking out.”
Fabiano de Oliveira and his wife had been dating for eight years, ever since Karah de Oliveira’s sister introduced them and they started working next door to each other — he at a pizza place, she at a Dunkin’ Donuts. They had a son three years later, but he waited until 2016 to marry Karah de Oliveira, a Massachusetts native, partly because he did not want her family to think he was angling for a green card.
After the wedding, all the things they could not do while he lacked legal status became obvious: Not being able to go on their honeymoon, because he could not fly. Not being able to get a joint credit card. Not being able to get car insurance.
“He got caught because he was trying to do the right thing,” Karah de Oliveira said of her husband’s arrest on Jan. 9. “It was like a setup.”
It took a month for her husband to be released.
Like many of the immigrants detained this way, Fabiano de Oliveira, a house painter, had no criminal history. To the Trump administration, the other thing they had in common was more germane: a legal but, until now, unenforced obligation to leave the country that had stuck to them for years, even as they pieced together lives and families in the U.S.
In the later years of the Obama administration, the government mostly left people without criminal records alone, focusing instead on immigrants who had only recently arrived or had been convicted of serious crimes.
But the Trump administration emphasizes that everyone living here illegally is fair game for deportation, a policy that has bumped up immigration arrests by more than 40 percent since the beginning of 2017. Those who were ordered out of the country years ago are especially easy marks for an agency with limited resources for enforcement — especially if they walk straight into an immigration office.