Citizenship no guarantee that spouse can follow to US

Immigrant path to residency can be steep

QUINCY - On a proud December day, Nancy Hanna raised her right hand in the John F. Kennedy Library in Dorchester and took the oath of US citizenship. Then she rushed home to call her congressman: She told him she wanted her husband back.

Hanna believed that becoming a US citizen would open the door for her husband, Ekram, a native of Egypt like her, to join her in this country.

But that was more than two years ago. Now, instead of living with her husband, she is a single mother learning a hard lesson increasingly confronting US citizens and their immigrant spouses: Marriage is no guarantee of legal residency.

"I thought it was going to be easy, that my husband would come back," said Hanna, her eyes welling up as she sat in the condominium they shared in Quincy overlooking the bay. "My whole life has been on hold now. I don't feel like I'm really living."

Traditionally, marriage to a US citizen is one of the easiest ways for immigrants to gain legal residency. But now it can be an uphill battle, even for legitimate couples with children, mortgages, and scrapbooks filled with photos.

The government has long screened for sham marriages involving immigrants, including by asking applicants suchquestions as the name of the person who fixed them up or who attended their wedding.

But immigration lawyers say federal law is increasingly tough on real married couples, as well those in which the spouse has violated immigration law, such as crossing the border illegally. Federal law requires such violators to return to their native countries while their spouses apply for permission to bring them back.

In the past, some short-term laws have waived that requirement, but current law can keep couples apart for as long as a decade. The law, first passed in 1996, bars people who have lived here illegally for several years: three years if they have been here six months or more, and 10 years if they have resided here for more than a year.

The restrictions often come as a shock to newly married immigrants and their US citizen spouses, who thought marriage would solve their problems.

"So many people come into my office and say: 'OK, I married a US citizen. Can I have a green card now?' " said Joy Cahaly, a Boston immigration lawyer. "No. There's a lot more to it than that."

Immigration officials say they are simply enforcing the law.

"People believe once they're married to a US citizen they're home free, but that's just not the case, and that's never been the case," said Shawn Saucier, spokesman for US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Mark Krikorian - executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which favors stricter controls on immigration - said the government's job is to enforce the law. He said the people in difficult situations have skirted or broken the laws and now are paying a price for it.

"This is the kind of tough problem that you create for yourself when you don't enforce your immigration laws for a long time," he said. "Some people are going to suffer for it."

Couples are facing reality the hard way, apart from each other.

Cahaly, with the support of US Senator John F. Kerry, is fighting the deportation of Norma Al-Hilfy, the Guatemala-born spouse of a naturalized US citizen, Raad Al-Hilfy, who was wounded in a grenade attack in Iraq while working as a translator. The couple, who own a house in Watertown, have a baby boy.

Norma Al-Hilfy sneaked into the United States illegally about 17 years ago and has been ordered to leave.

Cahaly is hopeful the government will ultimately let her stay in this country. But if an immigration judge deports her, she will not be able to return for 10 years because of the federal law.

Other families across the Bay State face similar anxieties, desperate to be reunited but also paying a price for their mistakes.

In Randolph, Sandra Simon, a 32-year-old US citizen originally from Haiti, hired a lawyer to try to reunite her with her husband, Evans Stenley Simon, who was deported in 2002, less than a year after they married.

Authorities discovered that he had been ordered deported under the fake name he had used to work illegally at a fast-food restaurant.

When he left, she was six months pregnant and enrolled at a community college, planning to become a nurse. Now the boy is 5 years old, his father is still in Haiti, and she has dropped out of school to work and pay legal fees.

She visits him in Haiti once a year and has considered moving there, despite her fears about violence and rampant poverty. For now, she tells her son that his father is on vacation.

"Hopefully my husband will come back," she said wearily. "It's just tearing apart our family. It's driving me crazy."

Nancy and Ekram Hanna have been apart for nearly four years. He had applied for political asylum in 2001 but was rejected in 2004. A judge allowed him to leave the country voluntarily.

He wasn't allowed to immigrate at the time, because 21 years ago he applied for temporary residency as an agricultural worker through a system the government said was a scam.

His lawyer said he was never charged in the case, and his wife said he worked briefly on a farm.

Last year, he tried to apply again, saying that his absence caused his wife extreme hardship, but the US Citizenship and Immigration Service disagreed.

Nancy Hanna cannot believe that the government doesn't consider her hardship extreme.

Before her husband left, theirs was an ordinary family that ate breakfast at Bickford's and attended church every Sunday.

As Coptic Christians, they felt greater freedom to practice their religion in the United States than in mostly Muslim Egypt, where they said they had been harassed for their beliefs. In Quincy, he worked at a relative's pizza business; she cared for their daughter, Christina.

Now she has had to rely on government health insurance. She might lose their condo. She is so depressed she cannot stop crying.

She has visited her husband in Egypt, which resulted in a second pregnancy. On June 1, she gave birth to their second child, Megan Mary, one month premature.

"I feel like the whole world has collapsed around me," she said. "Every time I knock on the door, basically something closes."

Maria Sacchetti can be reached at msacchetti@globe.com.