Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times  An immigration office where people were having their marriages scrutinized.  THE retired mechanic from Michigan looked shell-shocked beside his bride, a classical pianist from Moscow who clutched the printed e-mail exchanges of their Internet romance. Young newlyweds from Long Island, still recovering from their reception for 600 guests the previous weekend, faltered as their lawyer quizzed them on the details of their City Hall ceremony four months before. A Manhattan woman bickered with her Turkish spouse about the kinds of questions they had been warned to expect.  Did they know the color of each other’s toothbrush? The pattern of the bathroom tile? What had they done last New Year’s? And were they ready to answer far more intimate queries from a government official hunting for signs their marriage was fake?  “Embarrassing questions,” explained the Manhattanite, Lindsay Garvy-Yeguf, 28, the butterfly tattoo on her foot growing jittery, as her husband, Gunes Yeguf, 31, turned paler in his dark suit. “They might ask you about your sex life.”  These three were among dozens of couples inside federal immigration headquarters in Manhattan one recent Tuesday, seated in a crowded waiting room where posters exhorted everyone to “Celebrate Citizenship, Celebrate America.”  Having flunked their first interviews with United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, they had entered the mysterious world of the “Stokes unit,” a uniquely New York variation on the marriage interviews conducted nationwide whenever a citizen seeks a green card for a foreign spouse. Named for a 1976 federal court settlement that gave couples, among other protections, the right to bring a lawyer to a second, recorded interview if their first one raised suspicions of fraud, the Stokes unit recently doubled its staff to 22 officers.  It is a story line familiar from pop culture: “The Proposal” last year, “Green Card” in 1990. And while the authorities do not question the validity of the marriage of Faisal Shahzad, the failed Times Square bomber, his arrest last month did renew questions about the process of scrutinizing spousal green-card petitions. Nationwide, the number of such petitions denied for fraud is tiny: 506 of the 241,154 filed by citizens in the last fiscal year, or two-tenths of 1 percent (an additional 7 percent were denied on other grounds, like failing to show up for an interview).  Some critics contend that the low numbers simply show the system is easily fooled, while others say that exaggerated estimates of marriage fraud over the years have created a bureaucratic monster, thwarting legitimate, if unconventional, couples and spurring unconstitutional intrusion into their lives.  In some parts of the country, the authorities stage dawn bed checks. “Someone shows up at your house with a badge and a gun, unannounced,” said Laura Lichter, an immigration lawyer in Denver. “ ‘Hi, we’re here from immigration. Do you mind if we come in to look and see if two towels are wet?’ ”  While Stokes makes such home visits off-limits in New York State, lawyers and immigrant advocates complain that, at its worst, the process is a Kafkaesque version of “The Newlywed Game,” with dire consequences: those who fail can be put on a path to deportation. Couples’ futures together depend on proving separately to a skeptical bureaucrat that, as the law states, they did not marry “solely” for a green card. (Passing the interviews simply makes a foreign spouse eligible for a green card; getting one requires a separate application and security clearance.)  In the modern jambalaya of online dating, arranged weddings, bicoastal relationships, open marriages and serial divorce, a bona fide union can be harder than ever to discern, leaving lovers who are unable to produce a land-line telephone bill facing questions about birth control. That Tuesday in the Stokes unit, one couple volunteered that the wife was eight weeks pregnant only to have the husband be asked: “Is it yours?”  “The latitude that officers have is broad, and one that has to be exercised with a lot of care,” said Andrea Quarantillo, the immigration agency’s district director for New York. “Is it perfect? No. It’s judgmental.”  According to an agency worksheet that was recently leaked online, red flags include “unusual cultural differences,” a large age discrepancy, an “unusual” number of children and a citizen with meager means. Daniel Lundy, an immigration lawyer, said the boxes on the worksheet “pretty much invite racial profiling and other stereotypes.”  “You could be married 50 years and still find it difficult to pass,” Mr. Lundy said of the Stokes process.  The unit’s lore is worthy of its own reality TV series — sham couples caught red-handed, yes, but also quirky ones whose authenticity surprised everyone. The gay man who claimed he had suddenly found his female soul mate (denied); the recovering alcoholic who had lost his memory (approved); the man who volunteered that he had erectile dysfunction in an attempt to explain why his mate did not know the location of his nine tattoos (unsuccessful); the elderly citizen who lost an arm in a subway accident, but found happiness with a young Caribbean wife (successful).  “We can’t impose our definition of marriage, especially being in New York,” said Maria Guerra, a Stokes supervisor. “We’ve seen it all.”  AN officer looked out on the waiting room, trying to read body language. Were some couples over the top, snuggling and holding hands? Did some seem like strangers?  Coming Monday: A Queens couple, married 17 years and denied three times, is still asking for a green card.
A pop-culture story line â marrying not for love, but for green cards â is the focus of a New York immigration unit. As in the movies, love usually wins.