Verify a Ghana or Nigeria Divorce Decree Before Your Marriage Visa

A U.S. citizen called the Immigration Answer Show about a marriage-based case for her husband from Ghana, whose prior divorce had been finalized back home while he was already in the United States. Founding attorney Jim Hacking flagged something most couples never think to check: whether the divorce decree itself is real.

Every marriage petition rests on both people having been free to marry, which means every earlier marriage was legally terminated. 8 C.F.R. § 204.2(a)(2) requires documentary proof that all prior marriages of both spouses ended by death, divorce, or annulment. A decree that turns out to be fraudulent doesn’t just weaken the case. It means the current marriage may never have been valid, because one party was still legally married to someone else.

The State Department says the concern out loud on its own country pages. For Ghana, its reciprocity guidance warns that “certificates of divorce issued by courts that are not in the jurisdiction of residence of the applicants should be considered suspicious,” and that sworn affidavits of a customary divorce “do not constitute proper documentation.” For Nigeria, it is blunter still: “false divorce documents and decrees can be filed in the Nigerian court system, backdated, and inserted into older court records,” and courts “may verify a document as genuine, even if there are no records.”

That is why Hacking told the caller not to trust the paper in hand.

The two pieces of that advice both matter. Use an independent lawyer, not the one who produced the decree, because a document obtained through the same channel that may have manufactured it verifies nothing. And go to the issuing court to confirm the divorce is on the record, before the petition is filed rather than after a consular officer refers it to a fraud unit. If the divorce doesn’t hold up, the fix is to remarry once the prior marriage is properly dissolved, which is far cheaper now than a denial and a misrepresentation finding later.

Foreign divorces trip up marriage cases in more than one way. A decree can be genuine and still fail if the court lacked jurisdiction, which is the problem when both spouses were in the U.S. during a foreign power-of-attorney divorce, and unresolved marital status is exactly the kind of thing that has to be cleaned up before filing, the way an undisclosed divorce has to be fixed on a parent’s petition.