Marine Corps Officer charged with citizenship fraud

Samar Spinelli

This was today's headline in the European Stars & Stripes:

Okinawa Marine pleads guilty to faking marriage to gain citizenship

CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa — A Marine captain assigned to the Okinawa-based 1st Marine Aircraft Wing pleaded guilty Tuesday to faking a marriage to gain U.S. citizenship.
According to the U.S. Justice Department, Capt. Samar Khalil Nabbou Spinelli, 39, formerly of Lebanon, admitted in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan that she paid a Detroit-area man in 1990 to marry her so she could stay in the U.S. after her student visa expired and eventually become a citizen.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I don't exactly come down soft on illegal immigration. I'm about has hard-core against it as someone can possibly be. And people who try to cheat the system usually make my blood boil. But this is one of the few times I would lean toward leniency. This was no welfare queen, having one baby after another and living off the government dole. Nor was this a drug dealer, or a terrorist (as far as we know). This is a woman who, by all accounts, honorably served in the US Marine corps for 15 years (9 as an officer, 6 as enlisted), including two tours in Iraq.

Certainly, she has to lose her citizenship, since her paperwork was invalid. And this leads to a kind of domino effect. As a non-US citizen, she can't hold a regular security clearance, which means she can't be a commissioned officer any more. In turn, this means she must leave the Marine Corps. Unfortunately there is nothing that can be done about this, although theoretically, since she is now in a legitimate marriage with a US citizen (another Marine captain) she could apply for citizenship again. But it's very unlikely it would be approved anytime soon.

In addition to all of the above, she faces the possibility of months of jail time, deportation, and a bar to re-entry into the United States. Unlike the above, these are all things that do not need to happen.

If all this is done, it seems like both sides really lose. Considering her service to this country, is jail really warranted? And deporting her from the country will put an additional strain on her children and the life/career of her Marine husband.

Here's an alternate idea. Instead of going to jail, how about something more productive, such as requiring her to serve out the remainder of her obligation as an enlisted Marine (enlisted personnel do not need security clearances)? But unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. As far as I know, there is no legal mechanism in the armed forces that lets you demote an officer down to an enlisted rank. All I can do is wish her the best. She made an unfortunate choice many years ago, and now has to live with the consequences of that decision. But I would also hate to see her go.

Samar Spinelli was caught as part of a wider investigation of a friend of hers who joined the FBI under similar false pretenses and another woman, whose husband was charged with tax evasion in a scheme to conceal more than $20 million destined to go to people in Lebanon, some of whom had ties with Hezbollah. I do not advocate leniency for anyone involved in that nonsense. I'm not privy to all the facts of the case, but from what I've read, Spinelli had not had ties to any of those people for years, and there was no reason to question her loyalty or her service record. Other right-of-center sites are not quite so generous as I am, but they do have reason to be concerned. I suspect that this is something that happens far more often than most people realize.





Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed