A woman called the June 15 Immigration Answer Show with a story that stopped Jim Hacking cold. She married a man she believed was a never-married U.S. citizen, and he filed an I-130 for her and her children. Then he confessed: two months after marrying her, he had married a second woman, filed a separate green card petition for that woman, gone to an interview, and gotten her approved, all while still married to the caller.
That is not a paperwork mix-up. A person can only be legally married to one spouse at a time, so the second marriage is bigamous and void. That means the petition that produced the second woman’s approval rests on a marriage that never legally existed. And the caller’s own pending case is now anchored to a petitioner who has demonstrated exactly the kind of fraud USCIS exists to catch.
mic What the Attorney Says
“You need to withdraw it right away.”
The reason to pull the I-485 immediately is self-protection. If the caller sits in a pending marriage case built on this man’s I-130, she risks walking into an interview tied to a petitioner USCIS can show is a bigamist and a liar, and having his fraud splash onto her. Withdrawing her adjustment application takes her out of that line of fire while she decides what her life, not just her immigration file, is going to look like.
Marriage fraud has teeth beyond the individual case. INA 204(c) bars approval of any future petition for a person who has ever conspired to enter a marriage to evade the immigration laws, a permanent mark. The second woman’s approval, built on a void marriage, is itself exposed to revocation, and the husband’s conduct is criminal, not merely a civil immigration matter.
For the caller, the immigration path forward depends on her own status, which was an F-1 she let lapse when she deferred school for the marriage. That’s a problem to solve separately, and carefully. What she should not do is let his petition carry her.
If you discover your petitioner spouse committed fraud (a hidden marriage, a hidden divorce, a false claim), the instinct to wait and see is the wrong one. The same logic applies when a citizen spouse withdraws an I-130 out of anger or when someone was coerced into a joint I-751: you want distance from a case that can be used to prove fraud, and you want it before you face an officer across the interview table.