Memoir of another USCIS interview

We sat there in the waiting room discussing how the interview would go and whether the spouse of the applicant would have to participate. This can happen when a Legal Permanent Resident in the United States is asking to become a U.S. citizen after just three years as resident. In that case, becoming a U.S. citizen is contingent upon your marriage to a U.S. citizen. Thus the U.S. citizen spouse may need to participate. Once the Immigration Officer called us into the interview room, she indicated the U.S. citizen spouse could remain in the waiting lobby. The applicant was a Mexican national who was very intelligent and spoke English almost perfectly. The only question after completing the interview was which gender to assign in the Naturalization Certificate. The applicant was born a male but at the point of filing the application for naturalization as a U.S. citizen, he was in the process of transitioning to a woman. There is no legal guidance on this subject just yet so USCIS decided that the gender would have remain "male" until such time as the applicant can produce a legal document, like a court order, that legally changes the gender to "female".

Memoir of an USCIS Immigration Interview

As I sat there in the waiting room explaining to my clients what to expect of an interview with an USCIS immigration officer, one of them asked me “have you ever represented a couple like us?” I said that I had not, but the reason is that I had not had the opportunity to do it before. Then I explained to them that it should be no different than any other married couple. After we actually finished the interview, my opinion may have changed a little. In this case, one spouse was an American citizen by virtue of having been born in Puerto Rico. The other spouse is a citizen of Venezuela who came to the U.S. on a visitor’s visa several years ago and now is out of status. Even though this couple claims that they have known each other for about ten years, they have very little in the way of documentation to prove that their relationship is real. In cases like this, immigration officers sometimes separate the couple in order to ask them a serious of questions to each one of them. Then they will compare how much the answers are consistent for each person. This is what is known as a Stokes Interview after the name of the case which upheld the validity of such tactics by immigration officers. This is exactly what happened in this case. In my experience, immigration officials ask a long series of questions ranging from where did they meet to what does your spouse eat for breakfast each morning. They will also ask questions such “what was the last time you were intimate?” or “when was the last time you had sex?”. In this case, there were no questions at all about intimacy and I found that to be curious. One possible reason for this is that USCIS officials may be reluctant to ask such questions of a same-sex couple. I have never had a couple of opposite sexes that went through a Stokes interview without intimacy questions. Next week, I will represent another same-sex couple. Today the couple involved two women. Next week the couple will involve two men. It will be interesting to see if the treatment by USCIS officials is any different.