Putro v. Lynch, No. 14-2430 (7th Cir. 2016)
Annotate this CasePutro, a citizen of Latvia, entered the U.S. on a 4-month, foreign-exchange student visa in 1999 and overstayed. She married a U.S. citizen (Zalesky) in 2004 and gained conditional permanent residency, 8 U.S.C. 1186a(1). Her husband died of a drug overdose in 2006, before they could petition jointly to remove the conditions. Putro petitioned on her own; USCIS construed the petition as a request for a discretionary waiver of the joint-petition requirement, denied the waiver, and ordered Putro removed, stating that it had “reason to believe” that she had committed marriage fraud by marrying Zalesky. The Seventh Circuit granted her petition for review. Putro did not need a waiver because her husband’s death during the conditional period exempted her from the joint-filing requirement. In mistakenly evaluating her petition as a request for a waiver, the agency erroneously placed on Putro the burden of proving that the marriage was bona fide.
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