In early 2003, a clerk at the Arlington County Courthouse noticed that twice a week a man would appear at her office with up to five couples, helping them to fill out applications for marriage licenses.
The couples rarely interacted and did not appear to know each other very well, according to authorities. The clerk became increasingly suspicious when she saw the man frequently filing divorce paperwork.
On the clerk's tip that a series of hastily arranged marriages were being performed in Arlington, county police, in conjunction with a task force of federal and local law enforcement agencies, launched a three-year investigation.
"There was a pattern of behavior here that just seemed odd," Chuck Rosenberg, a United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said during a press conference last Thursday.
LAST WEEK, 19 individuals were arrested for taking part in a well-organized marriage fraud scheme in Northern Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., which sought to help illegal aliens obtain lawful status in the United States, police officials said.
Authorities have identified more than 500 cases of fraudulent marriages, the majority of which occurred in Arlington. More arrests are expected in the coming weeks, and police expect as many as 1,000 sham marriages might have been arranged across the region by this network of individuals.
"This is a big number when we are talking about a small geographic area," Rosenberg said. "We think it's a very, very big problem."
Nine individuals have been charged with setting up fake marriages between U.S. citizens and illegal aliens seeking an expedited way to obtain visas and, therefore, stay in the country. Ten of the defendants were immigrants who entered into the marriages, and the remaining three were U.S. citizens who agreed to the marriages in exchange for money.
Most of the individuals involved in the plan were from Ghana, in West Africa, Rosenberg said.
THE IMMIGRANTS agreed to pay the "facilitators" between $2,500 to $6,000 in exchange for arranging the marriage. On their wedding day the aliens also gave their new spouses $500, along with a monthly $300 stipend for up to a year.
The facilitators would often introduce the couples on the day were set to apply for marriage licenses.
"We don't normally take an opinion of matters of the heart, but it's safe to say in this case that we do not believe in love at first sight," Rosenberg.
Virginia was deemed as the best place to get married, because it has no waiting period between applying for a license and holding the official ceremony, said Richard Trodden, the commonwealth's attorney for Arlington.
The facilitators would then concoct documents, such as utility bills and insurance records, to make it appear that the couple had lived together beforehand.
They would also "coach" the couples to answer questions about their relationship — including which side of the bed they slept on — before interviews with immigration services.
The facilitators were part of "a fairly well-structured" organization, said Arlington Police Chief Doug Scott.
The charges for immigration and marriage fraud carry sentences of up to 10 years and five years, respectively.