Arrested Pol Builds Marriage Biz

Wanda Geter-Pataky found a way to supplement her income while on paid leave from her Bridgeport city job and facing criminal charges for ballot fraud: Bring crews of out-of-state non-citizens to marry as many as 100-plus Americans a month at New Haven City Hall.

One recent day, for instance, Geter-Pataky conducted seven such marriages in New Haven City Hall. All seven involved an Indian-born spouse and an American-born spouse. None came from New Haven, according to their marriage licenses. They claimed they live in Houston, Waterbury, Queens, the Bronx, Long Island, Chesapeake, Virginia.

The nuptial-seekers mirrored similar groups showing up in city halls throughout the state: Couples, mostly with one spouse from India or sometimes other nations, looking to marry an American allegedly from another state. In some cases the dramatic new workload is tying up staffs trying to process marriage licenses and birth certificates for their own city residents. The cities, including New Haven as well as towns like Trumbull, have been wrestling with how to address the challenge and enable their own citizens to obtain licenses and birth certificates while working within the limits of the law.

Clipboard in hand, Geter-Pataky guided a couple at a time into the Office of the Registrar of Vital Statistics on New Haven City Hall’s first floor to fill out their license applications. She steered them to the elevator up to the second floor to marry them in the atrium outside the mayor’s office. Then on to another couple.

As Geter-Pataky accompanied one of the spouses through the hallway, the spouse was asked if she was being paid, as rumored, to engage in the marriage.

“Tell him no,” Geter-Pataky advised the woman.

“No, I’m not,” the woman then replied.

“This is a reporter,” Geter-Pataky then informed men and women scattered on benches and in the hallway outside the first-floor registrar’s office, directing them not to answer questions. A man working in tandem with Geter-Pataky took out his phone and began recording this reporter while ordering him to stop taking photos and to leave the City Hall building.

That day, Oct. 15, was one of many busy, and lucrative, marriage-officiating and handling days for Geter-Pataky. Geter-Pataky became a continual presence at New Haven City Hall in recent months shuffling groups of half-international couples through the marriage process.

Over the month leading up to Oct. 15, Geter-Pataky served as justice of the peace in 114 marriages at New Haven City Hall, according to documents obtained by the Independent under the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act. Overall, the number of marriage licenses New Haven granted in that month-long period quadrupled to almost 400 from a year ago, fueled by out-of-state marriages.

Geter-Pataky was asked if the people she was marrying live in New Haven. ​“Yes they do,” she answered.

In fact, in only three of those 114 marriages did any of the applicants list New Haven as their city of residence. Most of the marriages included one spouse from abroad: 79 involved a spouse from India, another 36 from other nations ranging from Georgia (nine) and Tajikistan (four) to Turkey, Russia, Egypt and Jamaica (two apiece).

Her burgeoning work comes at a time when the number of marriages conducted in New Haven has exploded, especially marriages involving one Indian immigrant. That phenomenon caught the attention of New Haven’s previous registrar, Patricia Clark. She notified the federal government of her suspicions about the honesty of those marriages. Clark resigned from her job after being placed on leave pending an investigation finding that she violated a city policy forbidding officials from reporting suspicions about immigration to federal authorities as well as other violations of city policies and procedures.

The number of such marriages has only increased since Clark’s departure. Several justices of the peace told the Independent that marriage brokers have repeatedly contacted them to conduct these unions, offering a minimum of $100 for the work — which, if Geter-Pataky collects that rate, would have earned her over $11,000 in just that one-month period.

That has led to a boom in marriages at New Haven City Hall, with regular gatherings of couples filling the halls and offices, often under the direction of Geter-Pataky, who is the busiest justice of the peace, according to city officials.

She has had some time on her hands. As she worked City Hall that day, she was on paid leave from a $64,790-salary government job as front-lobby greeter at Bridgeport City Hall. Bridgeport put her on leave after she was caught on surveillance video a second time allegedly illegally carting a bucket of harvested absentee ballots for a mayoral election, which a judge subsequently ordered re-run twice as a result. The state has arrested Geter-Pataky and charged her with four felony offenses in connection with that incident; that case is currently pending.

Geter-Pataky also serves as vice-chair of Bridgeport’s Democratic Party.

She walked away as the Independent questioned her about the marriages she was in the process of completing. She was asked about reports that spouses are being paid to marry Indian immigrants. ​“I don’t know,” she said as she continued back toward the registrar’s office. ​“Why are you asking me that?”

Statewide Challenge

The explosion in these marriages, especially ones involving Indian immigrants and third-party arrangers, has caught the attention of other justices of the peace as well as immigration attorneys.

Downtown retailer Matt Fantastic (aka Matt Loter) regularly performs marriages as a justice of the peace as well. Fantastic began receiving repeated text requests in late 2022 from people arranging marriages between Indian immigrants and younger Black or Latina American women.

Fantastic agreed to perform between 30 and 40 such marriages at City Hall in the subsequent months. Fantastic was paid between $100 and $300 per ceremony.

The marriages seemed suspicious, with no signs of a genuine bond, Fantastic said: The spouses would neither arrive nor leave together. They would almost never kiss. Many would avoid talking or looking at one another as much as possible.

But Fantastic didn’t ask questions or notify immigration authorities because that’s not the job of the justice of the peace according to government guidelines. Meanwhile, Fantastic, a local musician, began encountering women at clubs who reported being offered thousands of dollars by arrangers to ​“marry Indian dudes.”

Fantastic has stopped responding to those requests from ​“arrangers” but does continue officiating at other weddings. Fantastic was struck recently to see the flood of couples similar to ones Fantastic had previously married filling the area outside City Hall’s registrar’s office in concert with arrangers with clipboards: ​“It’s definitely brazen.”

Former vital statistics Registrar Trish Clark thought the same thing. She did report her suspicions to federal immigration authorities about 93 marriages licensed by her office. A subsequent City Hall-commissioned investigation found that 80 percent of the couples whom Clark reported to immigration included someone from India. The number of marriage license requests in New Haven approximately doubled to five or six per day around February 2023, and has continued soaring since.

“The requests particularly involved older Indian men, approximately in their thirties, residing in New York, New Jersey, Texas, and Utah,” the report stated. ​“The women the Indian men were marrying were New Haven residents who were much younger, approximately nineteen or twenty years old, and of African American and Hispanic backgrounds.”

While Geter-Pataky was the busiest ​“frequent flyer” among Indian-immigrant marriage justices this year, others have regularly shown up at City Hall to conduct the ceremonies as well. One of them is Steven R. Mullins of West Haven, who has sought elected office as a Republican candidate and chairs West Haven Fair Housing.

Asked about the marriages, Mullins told the Independent: ​“I get calls. People make arrangements. I don’t know what leads up to them. I don’t care.

“I marry anybody regardless of their ethnicity. I don’t discriminate. If they’ve got the proper qualifications and they go and get a license and they present the license to me, I can do the ceremony and make it official. I’m not an immigration expert. I can perform the ceremony and make it official. What leads up to it is not my business. I don’t care.“

Out-of-state arrangers have also been calling New Haven immigration attorney Damjan Denoble for help processing applications for green cards for people who have undergone these marriages.

Denoble said he has rejected these requests after speaking with the arrangers and sometimes their clients. He quickly concluded that the marriages are shams, he said.

He spoke of one case last week when the arranger put the client on the phone.

“What brought you guys together?” Denoble asked the client about his new spouse.

The man fumbled. ​“We fell in love,” he offered. The arranger quickly took the phone away.

These cases typically involve Indian immigrants with advanced degrees who are here on student visas and a ​“young Black woman, typically in her late teens or early 20s” who isn’t present for the call, Denoble said.

”The U.S. citizen spouse was said to be in a part-time or unskilled job and allegedly ineligible to sponsor the intending immigrant. When asked about this, the caller would mention an arranged sponsor,” Denoble reported. ​“The story of how the couple met was vague, often described as ​‘talking outside of the U.S. citizen’s workplace.’ They claimed to be in love and even living together, yet could provide no details on how they came to love one another. “

Denoble speculated that the caller typically would seek ​“employment-based” (EB) visas for researchers or professors, but such visas are not readily available for Indian nationals. The government caps the number of such visas, and the waiting list for Indians to receive such visas can run 100 years or longer.

So, Denoble said, the students find fixers on message boards or elsewhere on the internet. The fixers pay young Americans in need of money to marry the Indian immigrants. They find local justices of the peace who have experience walking the couples through the process at City Halls and marrying them. Then they seek to find lawyers like Denoble to help them fill out applications for green cards, including completing a form I‑30 petition with an important line that attests that they live with an American spouse.

Denoble said he’s been disturbed to observe the avalanche of such cases recently in New Haven City Hall:

In my ten years of experience, this fact pattern is a classic indicator of marriage fraud. Most notably, the third-party coordinator is a common feature, as reported in local news stories, such as the New Haven Independent’s coverage of the Patricia Clark affair. A significant power imbalance exists between the well-educated, advanced-degree-seeking male immigrant and the under-educated, low-income female U.S. petitioner. Adding to this is the conspicuous lack of shared interests, religion, culture, profession, or history — anything that typically binds people in genuine relationships.

In rare instances when such cases advance to in-office consultations, the U.S. citizen spouse often appears detached and unengaged, while the “evidence” of a marriage is typically limited to staged photos that resemble wax museum scenes rather than a life shared.

It's important to clarify that these cases do not involve ‘undocumented’ immigrants but rather legal non-immigrants seeking a pathway to residency through questionable and potentially fraudulent means orchestrated by third-party brokers.

This situation starkly contrasts with the approximately 500,000 genuine marriages between undocumented migrants and U.S. citizens, who might benefit from the Parole in Place program. Unfortunately, this program is currently stalled due to a pending lawsuit in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

As an immigration lawyer, I find myself frustrated by these fraudulent schemes, while deeply sympathetic to the hundreds of thousands of families where one spouse is undocumented, having come to the U.S. without a visa for a better life. And it’s clear why societies stall when we reduce people to flat categories like "documented" or "undocumented" in our daily discourse. We should aim to make society more cohesive, with people wealthier, healthier, and happier—and that requires seeing both the law and the people behind it in nuanced ways.

“This is not good for anyone. This ultimately hurts vulnerable people, especially immigrants,” agreed Kica Matos, who helped shape New Haven’s immigrant-welcoming policies as a deputy mayor and currently serves as president of the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and the Immigrant Justice Fund (IJF).

The Independent contacted several people who have asked New Haveners for help in arranging marriages and obtaining green cards. None admitted playing that role or agreed to speak further. Nor did people who showed up to get married. One 20-year-old woman, a 2022 Hillhouse High Grad, was ferried through the registrar’s office by a man of South Asian descent to pick up a copy of the certificate of marriage that Geter-Pataky had conducted weeks earlier. Outside the office, the woman was confused about what to do with the document, enlisting a friend to call another person to explain the form (which listed the current residence of her and her Indian-born husband as Des Moines, Washington) and where it should go. They declined to speak with a reporter about the marriage or the situation.

New Haven Learns From Other Cities

Stuck in the middle of this situation are officials in municipal vital statistics offices who have struggled to keep up with this new demand.

State law and guidance prohibit them from acting as law enforcement or inquiring into the legality of marriages, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker and city Health Director Maritza Bond noted in an interview this week. They also are legally required to marry people from other communities who come to the city’s door.

Their limited staff has found itself struggling to accommodate New Haveners coming to conduct their own routine, legal records business in the office.

The city’s new vital statistics registrar, Damaris Velez, said she has checked with other cities about how they’re handling the situation.

The first move she instituted as a result, which has already helped stem the flow: The office now has a two-day waiting period from when an officiant returns a license and a marriage certificate can be requested.

The rule change prevents the office’s staff from getting buried under immediate sudden waves of forms from out-of-staters while local people are waiting to do other business. And it gives staff time to document that the information on forms is correct. The office becomes less frantic. In addition, a justice of the peace can’t walk in with 10 couples, have them fill out license applications, obtain their licenses, and march upstairs to the second floor of City Hall to immediately tie the knot.

Now Velez and her boss, Director Bond, are looking at requiring people to submit their applications online and set up appointments in advance. They’re also looking at ways to prioritize New Haven residents either formally or informally who come to the vital statistics office.

Two years ago, the office was processing 92 marriage applications a month, according to city officials. That rose to 100 a year later, then began growing steadily earlier this year. By the time Wanda Geter-Pataky was in full gear shepherding 114 couples through the fast-checkout lane in the month leading up to Oct. 15 — along with less busy ​“frequent flyer” justices of the peace — the office handled 393 such applications over that same month-long period.

“We are concerned,” about the waves of out-of-state marriage applicants flooding the office, Bond said in an interview. ​“We want to make sure we’re a welcoming city. We also don’t support fraud, if there is fraud here.” At the same time, she noted, ​“we are not police officers. This is not our role.”

The town of Trumbull reinstituted an appointments-only policy for marriage applicants (originally instituted during the first year of the pandemic) after waves of out-of-state couples with one Indian immigrant spouse began tying up the staff earlier this year, according to Town Clerk Mary Markham. (In Trumbull, the vital records office is part of the town clerk’s office.)

Such couples had been showing up periodically for three years, she said. Then the city of Bridgeport had a computer problem earlier this year that temporarily redirected couples to Trumbull.

“All of a sudden they were aware of Trumbull again” and kept coming, Markham said.

As the November election was approaching (the office also handles election records), ​“we said, ​‘That’s it.’” The office limited the number of marriage applicants it would handle to one per hour. ​“That helped,” but there was still a problem of out-of-staters bringing in poorly prepared documents that ate up staff time. So now the office requires people to print out worksheets from the web and fill them out completely and submit them in advance.

Bridgeport was seeing an even faster-growing tide of these marriages as New Haven was within the last year: 25 a day (mostly involving Indian spouses, sometimes Ghanian), including justices like Wanda Geter-Pataky bringing large groups at once along with unidentified ​“guides,” according to Assistant Registrar of Vital Statistics Jessica Baldwin. ​“We were exactly like New Haven. We were getting nothing done. The marriages were overwhelming.”

So Bridgeport, learning from Trumbull, required advance appointments. Geter-Pataky pivoted to New Haven for her marriage work, for instance. That helped, though the office still gets jammed with these marriages.

Return To Park City

Since Oct. 15, after the encounter with an Independent reporter, Wanda Geter-Pataky has suddenly not been seen in New Haven City Hall.

Instead, she has returned to bringing posses of putative partners back to her home base at Bridgeport City Hall. ​“Everything she was doing in New Haven, she is now doing in Bridgeport,” coming to City Hall with as many as 10 – 15 half-Indian immigrant couples at a time, Baldwin said.

Geter-Pataky could use the money.

For legal bills, for instance. Her next scheduled state court date is Dec. 11 to answer to four felony absentee ballot-related and witness-tampering charges related to her actions in the 2019 Bridgeport mayoral election.

Since her last-seen Oct. 15 appearance doing business in New Haven City Hall, Bridgeport has fired her from her City Hall greeter job in that city after a year-long investigation into similar absentee ballot-stuffing allegations in the 2023 mayoral election. State elections officials have referred the 2023 absentee-ballot fraud allegations to the chief state’s attorney for possible prosecution.

And a new allegation has surfaced combining her immigrant and political work: that she helped an undocumented immigrant apply for an illegally cast absentee ballot. 

Geter-Pataky has pleaded not guilty to the pending 2019-related charges. She took the fifth on the stand when asked about the 2023-related charges when a judge subsequently ordered do-over mayoral elections.

Reached by phone this week, as the first of a series of planned questions, the Independent asked Geter-Pataky how she has gone about accumulating so many marriage clients.

Geter-Pataky chuckled. Then she hung up.