Translating the law into checklists

Lawyers translate immigration law into eligibility criteria and checklists for clients, who rely on professional expertise given bureaucratic opacity. Checklists guide couples to form a marital household, consisting of shared residence, joint finances and property, combined financial and legal risk, and entangled lifestyle. Since couples often approach lawyers before they are married and ready to file the petition, the checklist becomes the blueprint for how couples map out the next decade of their lives together while they remain under bureaucratic scrutiny.

During the first consultation, lawyers present a high-level translation of the spousal petition and its opaque review process by USCIS. My participants report spelling out what they expect from clients, from preparing documents to the timeline and potential outcomes of the petition. Not only does USCIS provide limited guidance, but many people also remain misinformed about how tedious and grueling the process can be. It can take several months to identify gaps, enact and document the changes, and curate the archive before an initial petition can be submitted to USCIS. This is in part because most couples do not have sufficient documents that experts believe will convince immigration officers that the marriage is legitimate, such as joint bank account statements, joint leases or deeds, joint utility or insurance bills, and joint tax returns. These items are almost always included in the checklist that lawyers provide to clients.

Lawyers report invoking the imagined adjudicator, whose traditional values determine the fate of the petition, when working with clients. I spoke with an Accredited Representative at a nonprofit serving the pan-immigrant community in their gateway metropolis. As a Spanish-speaking Latino professional, he works primarily with low-income, limited English proficient Latino immigrants for whom private attorneys are out of reach. Given the cultural and linguistic barriers that this community faces, especially when navigating legal bureaucracy, I inquired how he sets expectations for his clients when taking on a spousal petition case. “The way I kind of describe it to my clients is,” he explained, “‘Imagine, U.S.A. standards are kind of like your religious aunt or uncle …’ USCIS does have a pretty traditional view of marriage.” By likening immigration adjudicators to elders with traditional family values, lawyers help their clients visualize the kinds of eyes that will be reviewing their petition. This helps, lawyers find, couples internalize these values as they enact family behaviors to be documented on paper and inspected by adjudicators.

Participants describe USCIS as holding traditional values around marriage and romantic relationships. Understanding the values that undergird immigration bureaucracy is a key ingredient in accurately translating immigration law into checklists. A private attorney who works primarily with West African immigrants believes USCIS has “an antiquated mindset” regarding what “real” marriages look like. According to a seasoned nonprofit attorney with a diverse client base, these values remind her of the 1950s and its traditional expectations around gender roles and marriage. The traditional family, as described by the lawyers, resembles what Smith (Reference Smith1993) calls the “Standard North American Family” (SNAF), a ubiquitous discursive ideology that consists of a straight household with a bread-earning husband, a housekeeping wife, and biological children. Certainly, mixed-status couples who deviate from SNAF norms (including dual-income, queer, and childless couples) can be successful with their spousal petition. If not the exact characteristics of SNAF, then, what persist are the normative family values encoded in our laws and policies. Lawyers translate these values into lifestyles like cohabitation, joint finances, shared lifestyle, and family involvement when preparing the checklist for mixed-status couples.

At the same time, lawyers are quick to distance themselves from USCIS and position themselves as open-minded brokers who do not subscribe to the traditional views of marriage that they attribute to USCIS. They must balance immigration bureaucracy’s traditional views of marriage on the one hand and clients’ freedom to pursue their relationship on the other as they prepare their clients for adjudication. Attorneys are clear-eyed about the system through which they are incentivized to navigate their clients quickly and successfully: “I think of adjudicators as more traditional … I cater to that, not because I necessarily support that narrow view of marriage and relationships, [but] because I think that that’ll get me to the outcome faster,” remarked one nonprofit attorney who exclusively takes on family petitions and primarily serves low-income Asian immigrants in her region. Because conforming to traditional norms is more likely to avoid scrutiny, this attorney has adopted a pragmatic approach despite potential differences with how she personally thinks marriages should look like. Others have a more hands-off approach, like another nonprofit attorney who is upfront with her clients about the kind of evidence that USCIS “gives a lot of weight to” from her experience having represented numerous Latino immigrants, especially DACA recipients. At the top of her list is the proof of cohabitation and joint finances, which can be demonstrated using various documents, as explained in the next section. If a client asks whether they should incorporate all of the practices seen favorably by adjudicators, she tells them, “I’m not here to say you should or should not. What I can tell you is that it would definitely help.” Committed to getting petitions approved, lawyers provide clients with a checklist of the ideal family on paper.

Other lawyers emphasize couples’ right to express themselves, even if that meant diverging from established norms. “Every couple does things differently,” remarked one attorney who has worked with a wide array of clients through a well-established firm and community organizations. “They do it their own way, and I wouldn’t want people to be handcuffed into only one way of living their life or doing things.” A senior attorney, who has practiced immigration law for nearly 40 years and represented clients of diverse backgrounds, simply said, “marriages come in all shapes, colors, and flavors.” Recognizing the varying ways that people pursue marriage, many lawyers explained that they do not want to become a “couples counselor” for their clients. Lawyers remain wary of being judgmental about clients’ marital practices, which would turn them into what one attorney called the “love police.” An attorney whose family firm specializes in spousal petitions drew a clear distinction between lawyers and USCIS: “it’s not my job to judge your marriage. That’s immigration’s job.” Many respondents shared similar sentiments: they value clients’ autonomy to make independent decisions about their marriage, and they do not judge how clients choose to live their lives. Their expert service contrasts with the state’s emphasis on rooting out fraud. Lawyers thus position themselves as professional brokers of legal bureaucracy and advocates hesitant to intervene in the private lives of couples. “It’s kind of our job to build the trust with them and then work with them to build their own case,” explained the same attorney. They stress the relational and personalized approach when assembling a spousal petition.

Despite the open-minded approach that many participants reported, they also have stringent requirements for their clients before they will move forward with the paperwork. Most notably, respondents almost universally agree that cohabitation is absolutely necessary for the marital petition, save for exceptional circumstances. One private attorney regularly tells clients, “I can’t represent you until you move in together,” because cohabitation is one of the most important factors that adjudicators consider for spousal petitions. In addition, a sizable portion of his clients are West African, West Asian, or South Asian, for whom premarital cohabitation is often considered taboo and multigenerational housing is not uncommon even upon marriage. Though he understands differing cultural norms around marriage and cohabitation, this attorney has a clear prerequisite before couples can become his clients. For couples who have yet to move in together, lawyers prefer to wait until they have evidence of cohabitation, such as a joint lease, mortgage, or deed, before submitting the petition. Cohabitation has long been associated with legally documenting the establishment of a household (Abrams Reference Abrams2012), but it is not formally required in proving marital legitimacy under immigration law. Lawyers, however, translate the bona fide requirement for marital petitions as being rooted in standards of U.S. family law and thus ask couples to abide by its norms. Beyond simply moving in together, however, lawyers provide hands-on guidance on the steps they need to take to properly document cohabitation, as detailed in the following section.

Most respondents also have a checklist of potential evidence that they encourage clients to gather to accompany the petition. Though the checklists are not a step-by-step guide, they serve as a blueprint of “real” marriages that couples must follow. Besides cohabitation, couples are expected to commingle their finances through joint accounts and cards. They can also jointly own property and bear financial responsibility for their cars, retirement and investment accounts, and utilities. Though having a biological child together is sometimes said to be “slam dunk” evidence, my participants did not report encouraging their clients toward childbearing for the purposes of demonstrating marital legitimacy. This was in part because couples with kids can get rejected, contrary to lay knowledge. On the other hand, lawyers expect mixed-status couples to mark the occasion of their wedding and document it with photographs and receipts. A courthouse ceremony and a celebratory meal afterward are acceptable so long as clients can document that it was a special event featuring friends and family. Though not all couples can incorporate the recommended practices, lawyers present the checklist as a blueprint of family formation.

Professionals use the checklist as a menu of options, from which they can selectively curate a personalized checklist that couples can follow. “[It] rarely happens that they come for a consultation or the initial meeting with me, and they come with the full file,” explained a private attorney who serves West Asian immigrants, given her own heritage, as well as other communities. “The majority don’t have their documents already. When they come for the consultation on the first meeting, they ask us what is the list of documents that they need. So usually that’s when we provide them with the list of what needs to be done.” The checklist becomes a template based on which lawyers customize the behaviors that their client is expected to incorporate. These lifestyles fit the mold of the desirable and nonfraudulent immigrant that immigration officers are known to prefer when adjudicating petitions.

Legitimizing lifestyles are also culturally specific and are not intuitive for those who were not raised in middle-class American contexts. The private attorney with primarily West African clients and herself an immigrant from the region succinctly described these lifestyles: “it’s not something that every culture does.” She cited different norms around cohabitation and finances, familial and ethnoreligious obligations, and even interpersonal communication that she has observed among her clients. Respondents report outlining the contours of an idealized middle-class family in the U.S. context to contextualize the checklist. The nuclear family is a racialized concept (Sarkisian and Gerstel Reference Sarkisian and Gerstel2012) that is foreign to many immigrant communities yet forms the basis of marital legitimacy for immigration adjudication. Lawyers introduce, explain, and advise mainstream family behaviors to immigrant families who might otherwise have pursued alternative practices that USCIS might interpret as suspicious.

A handful of lawyers recognize their strategy of actively shaping the lives of the couples, beyond simply compiling documents. A private attorney with nearly 30 years of experience described the process as “a little stilted, because we don’t necessarily go through life like that, like sticking each other on bills.” In many cases, lawyers play a significant role in guiding couples to enact, document, and sustain traditional family behaviors as they navigate through the years-long process of family reunification.

Enacting and documenting bona fide marriage

Upon translating immigration law into checklists, lawyers direct couples to enact and document legitimizing lifestyles. If the checklist described above is a written template for couples to follow, then lawyers become guides who handhold clients in adopting it. This can range from suggesting a particular behavior, offering corrections, troubleshooting bureaucratic challenges, and brainstorming additional behaviors to document. Though respondents were hesitant to suggest a minimum number of documents necessary to submit with the petition, it was not uncommon to submit several dozen documents and up to 200 photographs to USCIS. Obtaining documents necessitates behavioral changes, and lawyers counsel their clients on how to embody the lifestyles in ways that will convince immigration officers.

Being jointly responsible for utility bills is considered strong evidence of marital legitimacy, because they prove the two most important aspects of a bona fide relationship: cohabitation and joint finances. A private attorney with more than a decade of experience explained, “USCIS tends to favor utility bills, especially because they see them as proof that they’re living together.” Lawyers help their clients overcome bureaucratic hurdles that might prevent them from making these changes. In one region where a second person cannot be added to the account, the attorney with a family firm specializing in spousal petitions tells his clients to visit their local utility company’s office in person. If a utility company does not allow two names on its bill, other attorneys instruct their clients to add the spouse to the “care of” line. Lawyers reported their clients’ incorporating these tips and returning with updated utility bills listing both names. These bureaucratic strategies help build documentary evidence that are seen as legitimate by bureaucrats for government benefits like Medicaid, driver’s licenses, and green cards.

One persistent barrier to formal documentation for many immigrants is their lack of a Social Security Number (SSN), which is typically required to affiliate with institutions like banks, utility companies, and landlords. Unfortunately, documents from these very institutions are given the most weight by USCIS, for both the authenticity of the document itself and evidence of legitimacy. One lawyer with nearly three decades of experience and expertise in spousal petitions guides clients without an SSN to establish themselves with more lenient financial institutions: “We send them to credit unions, because credit unions don’t require social security numbers. And that’s where a lot of undocumented people bank. So we look for ways for them to build up their documentation.” Immigrants understand that engaging with mainstream institutions and establishing themselves in their systems will help strengthening their claims (Asad Reference Asad2023). In getting clients to amass the necessary paperwork, lawyers become guides that help immigrants establish formal relationships with nonstate institutions that might have otherwise been inaccessible to them. Becoming legible to the state, in turn, facilitates immigrant integration into the mainstream via financial institutions.

Respondents describe instructing their clients on how to manage their joint finances. This starts with ensuring that couples have joint bank accounts, especially a checking account used for recurring and everyday household expenses. The attorney with nearly 40 years of experience approaches this issue quite directly: “if they don’t have joint bank accounts, well, I say, ‘How come? Are you going to? And why don’t you have one now?’” Beyond simply opening an account, lawyers expect couples to actively use the account. When couples brought statements with hardly any transactions, she explained why this is not sufficient and instructed them on how to strengthen this piece of evidence. “[Clients think] as long as there’s a positive balance in the bank account, that [it’s] fine,” she explained. “If it’s a joint account, then it has to be used. You don’t just plunk $1,000 in an account and leave it there.” Merely opening an account together would not satisfy USCIS; bank statements without regular transactions are seen as suspicious and not evidentiary of joint finances. As a result, lawyers ask clients to meaningfully combine their finances, recognizing that these behaviors might not be standard practice for couples. “Not everyone just naturally does those things,” remarked the attorney who previously described this process as being “stilted.” Her consultations are designed to help clients understand the “leg work” needed to adopt these behaviors. Though some professionals were more flexible about couples’ finances, deviations would require additional documentation and potentially invite unwanted scrutiny from bureaucrats. Following their intervention, participants observe marked changes in couples’ banking practices as evidenced in financial statements that lawyers review before appending to the petition.

Another key financial document is tax returns, which is a “high value [evidence] in the eyes of USCIS,” according to the nonprofit attorney with DACAmented clients. Lawyers ask clients to file as “married filing jointly” starting with the year they became legally wedded. In addition to asking couples to jointly file their taxes, multiple participants recalled superseding the advice of accountants. It was not uncommon to come across couples who filed as “head of household,” a tax loophole used by accountants to lower the tax burden. For immigration purposes, filing taxes jointly is important to demonstrate the couple’s financial commingling – especially with the government. In this way, joint tax returns are unique pieces of evidence wherein marital relations are validated with the federal government. If lawyers believe that a client’s taxes are filed incorrectly, they confidently requested the client to go back to the accountant and file an amended tax return as “married filing jointly.” As I explain in the following section, tax returns become more important during subsequent petitions towards naturalization. If a joint tax return is available for the initial petition, however, lawyers were eager to include it, given its weight in establishing the bona fides.

Beyond finances, lawyers also like to see evidence that the couple has established an intimate, familial relationship. One such document is proof of insurance coverage that includes both spouses in one household unit. As one private attorney with a substantial co-ethnic South Asian clientele explained, “health insurance is very, very key evidence, because you don’t put anyone who’s not a family member on your health insurance.” Lawyers draw on both formal and social meanings assigned to quasi-legal domains like health, auto, home, and life insurance. Lawyers, I find, assume that immigration officers interpret the addition of a spouse to one’s insurance plan as evidence of commitment to a familial relationship and the associated duties, like financial responsibility, joint ownership, and shared liability. As such, lawyers recommend couples to add each other in insurance coverage, which most of their clients incorporated into their family arrangements. Entangling their lives through formal institutions carries social meanings of household formation and further solidifies the bona fide nature of their marriage.

Lawyers ask couples to chronicle socially meaningful ways that couples spend money – and time – together. These activities connote middle-class lifestyles of consumption. “USCIS loves to see that you spent money on the investment of the relationship,” shared a nonprofit attorney who primarily serves queer and Latino immigrants. “They consider that like sharing your finances because you’re both contributing into this [relationship].” Lawyers favor submitting photos of couples in general, but ones that suggest significant investment in the relationship are especially encouraged. One private attorney with extensive experience working with mixed-status couples seeking to move from Asia, Latin America, and Oceania to the United States directs his clients to gather such evidence: “No, you’re gonna take photos together. You go on a trip? You take photos together. I don’t really care if you don’t like to do it. You’re going to do it.” Some lawyers include airfare and concert tickets along with the photos to clearly demonstrate the expenses associated with the photographically documented activities. As the private attorney with a sizable co-ethnic South Asian clientele corroborated, “[taking trips] is sometimes very helpful in letting them know that they have an ongoing relationship. Taking joint trips together, spending money, staying in the same hotel room, showing king-size bed… Both the couple’s names on those reservations – all of that is key.” Though lawyers do not coerce couples to take trips or spend money on leisure activities, respondents report explaining to their clients the value of such behaviors and resulting evidentiary documentation for the petition. My participants recount subsequently receiving receipts and photographs of concerts, getaways, and other joint experiences that couples documented to be submitted alongside the petition.

In addition to trips, family-oriented holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas are considered important occasions to merit photographs. Photos with family and friends serve to quell concerns of fraud. “When other people are in the same photo with them, it just tells immigration so much more about that relationship. It shows that they’re holding themselves out as a married couple,” reasoned the attorney who asks couples to cohabitate before he can represent them. By putting themselves in the shoes of an imagined adjudicator with traditional views of marriage, lawyers suggest how couples should spend time together and with others. Beyond simply taking photos, couples are encouraged to adjust their leisure time and disposable income toward enacting legitimizing lifestyles. Respondents noted, however, that these behaviors are culturally specific and not always customary for immigrants hailing from vastly different contexts. Beyond the ethnoreligious roots of the major U.S. holidays, getaways and other leisure activities are not assigned the same significance or meanings for some immigrants as in mainstream U.S. culture, as one lawyer explained above. Thus, some participants reported being more didactic about the leisure activities that couples can enact and document for the purposes of assembling a convincing archive.

Lawyers’ curatorial practice involves identifying creative ways of demonstrating couples’ shared lives. Evidence of household consumption – retailer memberships (Costco, Sam’s Club), recreation (fitness), and subscriptions (Amazon Prime, Netflix) – become markers of a joint middle-class household. Subscriptions and memberships substantiate marital legitimacy for legal bureaucracy, because they symbolize a joint household with one address and shared financial responsibility. Because these documents were seen as supplemental to the ones identified above, lawyers placed less emphasis on actively promoting these behaviors. If couples already had or were considering joint memberships or subscriptions, however, lawyers encouraged clients to pursue and document them to be included with the petition. For younger or lower-income couples, lawyers considered these items more important since these clients are less likely to have other pieces of evidence that require more financial stability.

The curation also involves a close review of all documents amassed by couples. Lawyers select exemplary evidence that would simultaneously substantiate marital legitimacy and discourage extra scrutiny from adjudicators. This was particularly important with bank statements, which lawyers consider necessary to demonstrate financial commingling. At the same time, they were painfully aware that a well-used bank account can be revealing. The nonprofit attorney who exclusively works on spousal petitions recalled a couple’s statement listing a potentially suspicious charge: “I’m actually like looking at the bank statements line by line. And then there’s marijuana or a similar purchase. And I’m like, okay, let’s not submit that. Because even if it’s only [a purchase from] the U.S. citizen’s side, it could trigger enough interest and ‘curiosity’ and questions [from the USCIS officer]. So let’s withhold that.” Though it is unlikely that an officer would meticulously review the submitted evidence, lawyers are proactive about curating the file to ensure that it would not negatively impact the case. They highlight instances of scrutiny from adjudicators in previous cases to justify their curation of clients’ documents. The private attorney who previously described the “stilted” process requiring “leg work” from clients recalled an incident that informs her fastidiousness: “it’s not just giving them a bank statement. It’s also looking at that bank statement and making sure there’s not something [inappropriate]. I’ve had officers literally [go] line by line. Just being like, ‘What’s this charge? And to Chicago? And who was there with you?’ […] If they’re suspicious, you know they’ll do that kind of digging.” She and other respondents report curating their clients’ dossiers so that the documents depict a scrupulous marriage that would not trigger unwanted probing. They also relay these anecdotes to their clients as precautionary tales.

Lawyers remain open-minded about the varied ways that couples pursue their marriage and document it. Without established criteria used to evaluate marital legitimacy, USCIS’s discretionary review can be understood as holistic. Because “[USCIS is] looking at the whole thing in its entirety,” as the Accredited Representative put it, professionals emphasized their individualized approach to helping couples enact and document behaviors that fit their circumstances. This curatorial approach to case preparation is consistent with preventive lawyering strategies that emphasize preventing future legal issues by planning risk-averse activities and counseling clients to adhere to checklists (Winick Reference Winick2001). The process of enacting normative family practices demonstrates the counseling approach that lawyers engage in as they guide mixed-status couples to become idealized, nonfraudulent claimants.

Archiving routinized lifestyle

Marriage-based petitions have an additional adjudication step for USCIS to verify that mixed-status marriages remain bona fide 2 years after the initial petition submission. At the naturalization stage, the immigrant once again needs to show evidence that the couple remains married. As a result, couples must continue to enact and document the marital behaviors as recommended by their lawyers for nearly a decade. They not only guide couples to document their relationship for the initial petition but also prepare their clients for subsequent hurdles before the immigrant spouse can naturalize. The family-firm attorney specializing in spousal petitions noted, “our job is to kind of set clients up for not only this process, but the next two. You need proof of relationship for the conditional card. You need proof of relationship when you become a citizen. So we set them up … to have all of that stuff going forward.” Couples often work with the same lawyer across all three petitions. Consequently, lawyers advise couples to sustain and archive the routinized behaviors for many years so that the couples have fully adopted the lifestyles that lawyers guided them towards.

The initial petition submission can lead to one or more of the following responses from USCIS: Request for Evidence (RFE), in-person interview, or home visit. Each of these is an opportunity for USCIS to gather more information about their marriage before determining whether they should be approved as a legitimate couple. Whereas the RFE is a standard response for any immigration petition when additional information is needed, in-person interviews and home visits are specific to spousal petitions and are motivated by concerns of marriage fraud. In-person interviews are typically required for spousal petitions, whereas home visits are relatively infrequent.Footnote ³ Lawyers warn their clients about these steps so they understand the potential surveillance associated with the petition.

The lifestyle changes described above must be sustained across the life of the immigration case. Couples are expected to continue documenting their lives while USCIS processes their petition so that they are ready with additional and updated paperwork they can submit to USCIS. I spoke with a private attorney with nearly three decades of experience and his own firm with a high caseload, consisting mostly of Latino immigrants. When I asked what happens during the intervening months between petition submission and decision, he articulated expecting clients to “be gathering stuff while immigration processes the case” so that they are prepared with additional documents to submit in response to an RFE or to bring to an in-person interview. Lawyers expect clients to archive their marital behaviors between the initial petition submission and the in-person interview, a waiting period of 6–12 months. Another attorney presented yet another “leg work” that she described expecting from clients earlier: “hopefully they’ve followed my advice and gone and gotten some things together, so that when we go to the interview, we have a nice stack of things.” Adjudicators often ask couples for the latest evidence of their relationship, which they should have accrued since submitting the petition. Respondents report guiding couples to bring recent bank statements, utility bills, and photographs with family to interviews.

There are two main elements of building this archive: (1) establishing additional types of evidence, and (2) building an ever-updating archive of routinized lifestyles. The first is especially important in cases where a couple did not have certain crucial pieces of evidence for the initial petition submission. Clients are advised to build such evidence while the case is under review. In exceptional circumstances where a couple is unable to cohabit or combine their finances before petition submission, for example, it is expected that the couple makes those lifestyle changes and accrues additional evidence to complement less compelling evidence, like photos and retailer membership. The attorney at a well-established firm has told his clients to “bulk up on the better documentation” if the couple only submitted a thin dossier with the petition. If the couple had not jointly filed taxes before petition submission, for example, a joint tax return to present to the USCIS officer at the interview would solidify the case towards approval. Participants recount guiding couples regarding new routines they should establish, sustain, and document as they await an RFE or interview notice from USCIS.

Archiving ongoing evidence of routinized behaviors is necessary for all couples. Respondents agree that a one-time snapshot of the marriage is unconvincing to USCIS and that the continuation of these behaviors is necessary to convince adjudicators that the couple has thoroughly adopted these lifestyles. Several lawyers characterized paperwork going “stale,” referencing the fact that couples’ lives do not stop when their petition is submitted. “By the time [of] the interview, we would show up with a package of 8 months’ worth, and I’ve got a good-sized thing to hand in,” illustrated one private attorney with three decades of experience and a diverse clientele, including Eastern European and Caribbean immigrants. Because interview notices typically arrive within a year of the initial petition submission, lawyers emphasize the importance of continuing to gather documents as they wait to hear back from USCIS. Even in the rare scenario where the in-person interview is waived, neither the couple nor the lawyer would know that the interview would be waived until the case is approved. As a result, professionals approach all cases as if they would lead to additional scrutiny, either in the form of an RFE or an in-person interview. Couples, lawyers described, follow expert guidance and amass an ongoing record of their marriage to demonstrate that the behaviors they adopted have become routinized and archived.

Embodying traditional family behaviors becomes especially important in the rare case that a couple is subject to an unannounced home visit by USCIS. For petitions suspected of fraud, USCIS will send field officers to visit the shared residence of the couple unannounced (typically before sunrise). Only a handful of my participants had clients who were subject to home visits, though several shared their experience working on such cases. During home visits, USCIS officers take pictures of the shared residence and interrogate the couple about intimate details of their lives. It is assumed that the routines that couples adopt, like cohabitation, joint finances, and otherwise shared lifestyle, will be evident in their everyday household arrangements, such that an unannounced home visit can determine marital legitimacy. Though lawyers do not typically instruct their clients on how to prepare for home visits due to their rarity, they nevertheless guide their clients’ lifestyles to withstand such scrutiny.

For most couples, approval of the initial petition leads to CPR status, the conditions of which must be removed after 2 years. This removal of conditions process was created to deter marriage fraud and is yet another step during which the ongoing legitimacy of the couples’ marriages must be proven (Chetrit Reference Chetrit2011). Some lawyers are particularly concerned about the second review step, when USCIS might conduct a more thorough review of petitions before LPR status is granted, paving the way towards naturalization. The private attorney with a sizable co-ethnic South Asian clientele shared how she instructs her clients about archiving their lives: “I tell my clients, once they get their [conditional] green card … ‘Your journey doesn’t stop here … Have a little basket or a digital basket, if you will, and throw in every single receipt in there, [for] every single martini you had or whatever, put it in there. Everything will be important when you file the petition to remove conditions.’” Another private attorney with three decades of experience and expertise in working with West African immigrants tells her clients to “never throw away any piece of paper, every piece of mail with your address and your name.” Diligently saving paperwork itself becomes a routinized process as couples learn to archive documentary evidence of their lives.

Respondents insist that financial commingling must be active and not abandoned to demonstrate that a couple’s shared life is legitimate and not fraudulent. Respondents described asking their clients to return with bank statements indicating regular activity, to which couples obliged by making deposits of their income and withdrawals for everyday expenses. The private attorney who earlier shared the importance of utility bills explained a scenario that informs his approach: “[A joint bank account] can be good and bad, ‘cause I’ve had some [clients] where they opened it, but they didn’t really use it. So when we revisited the topic two years later when they had to remove conditions, it didn’t look on paper like they were really commingling funds because there wasn’t much activity, and [USCIS officers] do look at the activity.” As lawyers understand, avoiding additional scrutiny and potential denial requires coaching clients to routinize and archive the legitimizing family behaviors until the immigrant spouse becomes a naturalized citizen. One attorney has previously received an RFE requesting every bank statement for the past 2 years after submitting the petition to remove conditions, so he now preemptively requests his clients to share every statement they have with him so that he can include those documents in their file. In this way, maintaining an active archive becomes baked into couples’ lives.

Immigrants who become permanent residents through marriage are uniquely eligible for an expedited path toward naturalization after only 3 years of permanent residence, as compared to 5 years for all other immigrants. However, the expedited naturalization process again requires proof that the couple remains married. Though the naturalization step is not intended to involve a thorough review of marital legitimacy, couples are still incentivized to sustain their marital behaviors to ensure that the immigrant spouse can naturalize as a U.S. citizen without any issues. When naturalizing, joint tax returns are typically sufficient to demonstrate the bona fide nature of their marriage. The family-firm attorney explained that this is seen as an extension of the previous step: “When we file for the removal of conditions, [tax returns are] very critically important. They’re gonna want to see, after you’ve been married, you’re filing jointly married, not married filing separately either. And for citizenship, they’ll want to see the tax returns as well [for] the 3 previous years [and] if you’re filing married.” Couples are expected to continuously file joint tax returns following their nuptials until the immigrant spouse becomes naturalized. Respondents describe a heavy-handed approach when it comes to clients’ taxes. The attorney with four decades of experience “stipulate[s] to them that there be joint tax returns …. I tell them to henceforward file jointly and be prepared to submit joint returns if they are asked for it …. I tell them to be prepared for that request if it comes up.” As such, participants report universal compliance among their clients when it comes to joint tax filing.

From the first consultation to the immigrant spouse’s naturalization, lawyers stress their role in encouraging clients to live up to their expectations of what a bona fide marriage should look like on paper and in practice. At each step of this lengthy process, suspicions from immigration authorities could lead to illegalization and deportation for the beneficiary and criminal prosecution for the petitioner. Thus, lawyers ask couples to habituate and archive their lifestyles until the beneficiary is naturalized as a U.S. citizen. Through the process of helping couples establish and sustain routines associated with traditional family norms, lawyers become intimately involved in their clients’ domestic lives.

In total, this process takes at least 5 years, from when a couple submits the initial petition to when the immigrant spouse applies to naturalize as a U.S. citizen. Many couples wait years for the opportune timing to file the initial petition (Enriquez Reference Enriquez2020), and each step often becomes delayed due to lengthy USCIS processing times. In fact, about a year of wait time is typical for each of the three steps involved. The process – from working on the initial petition to being sworn in as a U.S. citizen – can easily span 10 years or longer for mixed-status couples. Couples find themselves sustaining these behaviors for years on end, and lawyers become intimately involved in these marriages as they guide their clients through each step with thorough review and feedback. Lawyers translate the law into a checklist of behaviors, which then must be enacted, routinized, and documented. This role highlights the durable and striking ways in which immigration law shapes the everyday lives of immigrants and their families beyond brief performances of deservingness or belonging that other immigration adjudication processes encourage.

Domestic counselors

I conceptualize lawyers as domestic counselors who shape intimate dimensions of quotidian life in accordance with normative visions of the law. This term encapsulates my finding that immigration lawyers provide guidance on the personal lives of mixed-status couples over the course of many years and transform marriages to conform to mainstream family norms. Lawyers become involved in domestic spheres not only by influencing couples’ intimate lives, but also by encouraging immigrant acculturation through the adoption of normative family behaviors. Because the family is the microcosm of the nation and represents its values (Yuval-Davis Reference Yuval-Davis1997), becoming legible as legitimate families operates both in the intimate sphere of the household and within politicized discourses around desirable (and nonthreatening) immigrant families. Lawyers also become counselors as part of their preventive legal training and as extensions of the state’s governance apparatus. Though not trained as therapists or social workers, immigration lawyers guide couples through intimate dimensions of their marriage, as do other nonstate actors embedded in criminal, medical, and welfare systems. Indeed, the scope of their counseling role resembles that of rehabilitation counselors or case managers, who might be involved in dictating minute aspects of clients’ day-to-day lives (Gowan and Whetstone Reference Gowan and Whetstone2012; Swanson and Weissert Reference Swanson and Weissert2018). The domestic counselor concept highlights immigration lawyers’ domain of influence (domestic lifestyles that belong in the nation) and role (counselors who shape behaviors) in making immigrant families embody the lifestyles and values embedded in the law.

The domestic counselor concept highlights the intimacy and depth of professional experts’ intervention in everyday life. By anticipating immigration officers’ discretionary interpretation of vague laws, lawyers mold their clients’ lives to conform to normative visions of the law when it comes to marriage and family. The desirable family has historically been coded as racially White, sexually heteronormative, and materially middle-class – or the so-called nuclear family in the neoliberal age (Sarkisian and Gerstel Reference Sarkisian and Gerstel2012). Bureaucrats are understood to see deviations from traditional family behaviors as foreign and suspicious. Immigration lawyers advise mixed-status couples on how to navigate the multi-step adjudication process over the course of several years. They handhold clients through everyday aspects of their lives, like household finances, utility statements, insurance coverage, and even vacations. Without clear benchmarks on what constitutes a legitimate marriage, lawyers take creative liberties in curating marital lifestyles that are more likely to be legible as legitimate in the eyes of immigration officers. The active shaping of immigrant families’ quotidian lives resembles the planning and counseling work of rehabilitation service providers and victim advocates (Kaufman et al. Reference Kaufman, Kaiser and Rumpf2018). Beyond coaching temporary performances of deservingness or belonging, lawyers who work with mixed-status couples over the course of a decade ensure that desirable lifestyles are routinized and habituated. Lawyers become nonstate agents who inculcate immigrant families with normative family values of the law.