In March 2026, the Justice Department filed a civil complaint seeking to strip the citizenship of a Miami man named Alec Nasreddine Kassir. According to the filing, Kassir had told USCIS he was living in marital union with his U.S. citizen spouse for the three years before his 2010 naturalization application, the exact window the law requires. He’d actually separated from her in 2009 and moved to Florida before he even filed. He admitted it himself in a 2018 guilty plea to an unrelated passport fraud charge, and the government didn’t come back for citizenship until 2026. That gap, eight years between the admission and the consequence, is the part people planning a fake marriage for citizenship consistently underestimate.
Marrying a U.S. citizen doesn’t just open a path to a green card. Under INA 319(a), it opens a shorter path to citizenship itself: three years of marriage and continuous marital union with the citizen spouse, instead of the standard five years every other permanent resident has to wait before filing Form N-400. That two year difference is the entire incentive. Someone running this kind of scheme isn’t after a green card as the end goal. The green card is just the thing you need to hold before you can file for citizenship on the fast track, and the underlying marriage fraud statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1325(c), treats knowingly entering a marriage to evade immigration law as a federal felony either way, carrying up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000, whether the person was chasing a green card or citizenship behind it.
Marital union is the specific legal requirement, and it means more than a valid marriage certificate. USCIS defines it as actually living together as spouses, not just remaining legally married on paper while living separate lives. That’s the exact element Kassir is alleged to have faked, according to the Department of Justice, which says he lied under oath at his naturalization interview about where he was actually living during that three year window.
A naturalization fraud for citizenship rarely gets caught in the room where it happens. It gets caught later, when something unrelated puts the person’s history under a microscope: a different criminal charge, a divorce filing with a timeline that doesn’t match what USCIS was told, a tax return or lease with an address that contradicts sworn testimony. Kassir’s case followed exactly that pattern. The passport fraud plea in 2018 created a sworn record of when he’d actually moved out, and that record sat there until the Justice Department’s current denaturalization effort came looking for exactly this kind of inconsistency.
USCIS doesn’t rely only on paperwork to make that case. Its Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate runs an Administrative Site Visit and Verification Program that can send officers to a couple’s stated address unannounced, specifically to check whether the people who claimed to live there actually do, alongside the joint financial records, photographs across time and locations, and sworn affidavits from friends and family that a genuine marriage-based petition is expected to produce. Policy guidance has also pushed USCIS toward issuing a formal Notice to Appear, the document that starts removal proceedings, in any case presenting substantiated fraud or material misrepresentation, rather than simply denying the benefit and moving on.
That enforcement push is not small. According to Fox News, the Justice Department has been pursuing what officials describe as the largest denaturalization effort in the department’s history, and reporting on the broader 2026 initiative puts the first wave at roughly 384 individuals, with internal targets calling for well over a hundred new referrals every month. Sham marriage is explicitly one of the categories these cases are built around, alongside concealed criminal history and identity fraud.
People tend to treat the naturalization oath as the finish line. Legally, it isn’t one, at least not an unconditional one. A naturalized citizen can lose that citizenship through a civil denaturalization lawsuit if the government can show a material false statement was made to obtain it, meaning citizenship would have been denied had the truth been known at the time. That materiality standard comes from the Supreme Court’s 2017 ruling in Maslenjak v. United States, and it’s a civil case, not a criminal one, which means the government only has to meet a lower burden of proof than it would in a criminal marriage fraud prosecution.
A fraud finding at any stage also carries consequences that outlast the specific benefit it was meant to get. Anyone determined to have entered a marriage for immigration purposes to evade immigration law is permanently barred under INA 204(c) from ever having a future marriage based petition approved on their behalf, regardless of how genuine a later relationship is, and a separate fraud or misrepresentation ground of inadmissibility can attach on top of that bar. None of this requires waiting for a criminal conviction first. A civil finding alone is enough to trigger it.
| Stage | What Gets Reviewed | Consequence If Fraud Is Found |
| Green card approval | Whether the marriage was genuine at the time it was entered into | Petition denied, or green card revoked with a Notice to Appear starting removal proceedings |
| Naturalization interview (3 year rule) | Whether marital union actually continued for the full three years before filing | N-400 denied, and the false statement itself can become a separate federal charge |
| Years after the oath | Whether any statement made to obtain citizenship was false and material | Citizenship revoked through a civil denaturalization suit, with no fixed expiration on when this can be pursued |
Losing citizenship this way typically means reverting to lawful permanent resident status, and the same underlying fraud that triggered the denaturalization usually makes the person deportable on top of it. Spouses or children whose own status came through that naturalized person can face consequences of their own, since their immigration history is built on a foundation the government has now found to be false.
A relationship that’s being used to beat the clock on naturalization has its own particular tells, separate from the general ones people associate with green card fraud.
The urgency lines up with the three year naturalization window specifically, not a visa deadline. Someone who brings up filing for citizenship early and often, and who treats the exact three year anniversary of the marriage as a milestone to hit rather than something that will happen whenever it happens, is thinking about a deadline the law actually imposes.
They maintain the marriage on paper while quietly building a separate life. This is harder to spot than a disappearing act, because the person stays legally married, keeps answering your calls, and may even still be listed at your address, while the actual day to day of living together has stopped. USCIS’s own definition of marital union exists because this exact gap, married but not really living as spouses, is the one the three year rule is built to filter out.
The relationship cools off noticeably right around the naturalization interview or the oath ceremony, not gradually over time but in a way that tracks the legal calendar more closely than it tracks anything that actually happened between the two of you.
If you believe your marriage was used this way, your own legal exposure is usually limited, since the false statements at the naturalization interview were made by your spouse, not by you. That said, document what you actually know about the relationship’s real timeline now, while you remember the specifics, rather than waiting until a government attorney asks you about it years from now the way Kassir’s case suggests can happen.
You can report what you believe happened to USCIS or to ICE Homeland Security Investigations, and because this now feeds directly into an active federal enforcement priority, a report tied to a specific person’s naturalization date and your own account of the marital union is exactly the kind of lead these cases get built from. Talk to an immigration attorney before you file anything or sign a sworn statement, particularly if you were asked to sign any paperwork yourself during the original naturalization process.
The three year rule only works as an incentive for fraud if the lie holds up for exactly three years and one interview. It doesn’t have to hold up forever, and for a while that made it look like the safer version of marriage fraud. What the 2026 denaturalization numbers show is that the government has started treating “forever” as the actual timeline anyway, going back years after the oath to test whether that one window was ever real.
