Court Opinion

ID: 9842850
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 02:19:48.578158+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:13:59.291748
License: Public Domain

PER CURIAM.
We stayed a deportation order pending appeal because the appeal presented at least one substantial question which would otherwise become moot.
*81A New York decree annulling the marriage of the appellant alien, and the statute quoted in Judge Prettyman's dissent, are the only basis of the deportation order. The statute authorizes deportation of an alien who is “found to have secured [his] visa through fraud, by contracting a marriage which” is afterwards retroactively annulled. The statute says nothing about securing a marriage through fraud. It mentions none of the various grounds on which marriages may be annulled. The chief question on this appeal is whether the statute means (1) that an alien whose marriage is annulled, on whatever ground, is to be deported if and only if he secured his visa through fraud; or whether it means (2) that an alien who secured his visa “by contracting a marriage” which is annulled for fraud is to be deported.
The New York court annulled this alien’s marriage “because of the fraud” of the alien but did not define his fraud. The New York court made no finding to the effect that he secured his visa through fraud, or that he had no genuine intent to be married, or even that his intent to be married was due, wholly or chiefly or at all, to a desire to improve his immigration status; or that he and his wife did not have, for some time, a happy married life. The wife’s complaint for annulment did not even allege, at all clearly, any of those things, and did clearly allege that the alien falsely represented to her that he intended to have children. This may have been a fraud on her, which justified annulment of the marriage, but whether it was a fraud on the immigration law is another question.