New Report Reveals Hardship, Family Separation for U.S. Citizens in Mixed-Status Marriages

American Families United's first survey of mixed-status couples reveals 20% already separated and 80% now discussing leaving the U.S. due to immigration policies tearing families apart.

American Families United published the results of their first-ever survey of mixed-status couples this week in a report titled “Collateral Damage: How Immigration Policy Harms U.S. Citizens in Mixed-Status Marriages.” In today’s post, I discuss some of the highlights of the report, explain why this report matters for reporters and our nations leaders, and share a technical note about how the report was created.

The report is based on a survey of U.S. citizens across the country who are married to spouses who will be unable to get legal status until Congress fixes this simple yet pernicious problem. Although American Families United and its many members have been advocating for mixed-status couples for nearly 20 years, elected leaders, the media, and the public have overlooked this important group for a long time. The data in the report helps us all to understand the unique experiences of mixed-status couples better and establish mixed-status couples as a crucial constituency that our leaders should pay more attention to.

The full report includes a letter from Ashley DeAzevedos, AFU’s Executive Director; an explanation of the methodology; thematic sections with graphs, tables, and direct quotes from mixed-status couples; and recommendations for various audiences (including reporters, policymakers, researchers, and mixed-status couples themselves). Since I worked on the report, of course I would encourage you to download and read the entire thing—but since I’ve been teaching long enough to know that not everyone does the reading 😊, here are some key takeaway points from the report:

• 20% of the couples surveyed were already living separated or living abroad. Concerns about how the immigration system is harming American families is not a future concern—it’s already happening now.

• Over 75% of couples have been married for over 10 years, and 20% of couples have been married for over 20 years. The average length of marriages is just over 13 years. These are not couples looking for a quick fix. These are committed relationships that want a simple fix to a simple problem that Congress keeps ignoring.

• 99% of immigrant spouses have been in the country over 10 years and nearly half have been in the country a quarter-century. They are already a part of our country, our communities, and our economy.

• Immigrant spouses work in crucial industries such as construction, food service, agriculture, and many of them are business owners. Many U.S. citizens in the study work in health care and education. The American economy pays a real price for forcing one spouse or both spouses to leave the country.

• The current unpopular deportation hysteria is forcing couples to have hard conversations about what to do as a family. Prior to January 2025, fewer than half of couples discussed leaving the country; since January, over 80% have had this conversation.

  

In an email about the report to her members on Tuesday, Ashley DeAzevedos (follow her on Instagram), AFU’s Executive Director, said: “The findings confirm what I hear from our members every day: immigration enforcement without meaningful pathways to legal status for the spouses of U.S. citizens is tearing American families apart.” Research is at its most powerful when its abstractions—all the data, graphs, tables, etc.—are able to reflect lived experience.

Ashley went on to explain the reach she hopes this report has for various constituents:

• “I hope this report helps elected leaders and policymakers at all levels of government understand the real cost of inaction.

• I hope it gives journalists the tools they need to tell these stories accurately and with depth.

• I hope it will reach everyday Americans who deserve to understand what their fellow citizens are going through.

• Most of all, I hope that U.S. citizens in mixed-status relationships, whether living in fear at home or separated from their spouse abroad, see this report and know they are not alone.”

I want to echo Ashley’s sentiments here. We really need to get this data into the hands of more reporters, more policymakers at all levels of government, and out into the public realm. I know that data alone will not change hearts—but I believe that data combined with authentic stories and sincere messengers can help us have more compassionate, informed, and solutions-oriented conversations. So please help us get this out.

Ashley and I discussed some the highlights of the survey in a public virtual event that is now available on YouTube. I also posted Amanda’s devastating story from that event earlier this week. I also spoke about the report with Sandra Sanchez at Border Report Live this week in a segment titled “Tracking mixed-status families, and record US detentions.”

Download the report from AFU’s website, where it is featured prominently on the homepage.

A technical note for the nerdiest among you

If you’re still reading, it’s only because you’re interested in pulling back the curtain on how this research report was produced. For the public briefing, I used Datawrapper to produce the figures and created the slides in Google Slides. That’s my preferred solution for most public presentations. As a big believer in teamwork and transparency, Google Slides allows you to co-author and make the slides public, and Datawrapper allows others to use the figures for themselves and download the data.

But for the report, transparency and coauthoring were less important than control and professional design. I wanted more control over the figures and wanted to ensure that they integrated with the text in a clear and consistent way that simply plunking Datawrapper’s .pngs into a document certainly would not do. I did not use a standard word processor. Anyone who has tried to write a long document in Microsoft Word knows how finicky that program can be with figures and long documents; Google Docs is even worse, lacking (by design) many of the essential elements needed to produce complex technical documents.

Instead, I turned to my favorite writing program—or rather, document production language—called LaTeX. LaTeX is like a coding language for creating professional documents and it is used widely in the technical and mathematical sciences for writing academic articles because the quality of typesetting (especially typesetting mathematical equations) is so superior to off-the-shelf word processors. Instead of clicking buttons in Microsoft Word, you write commands that tell the computer exactly how to format your text, equations, and layout. It’s daunting to non-programmers, but once you get over the learning curve, it’s hard to go back to Word.

One of the main advantages of LaTeX is consistency and precision. Once you set up your formatting rules, LaTeX ensures everything looks uniform throughout your document—perfect for dissertations, academic papers, and technical manuals. LaTeX is what gives the document that crisp, consistent look from top to bottom that you can’t always get with other programs. Also, because the document is technically just a text document, you can use version control systems like Git to maintain a robust history of the document. Most people who use LaTeX use Overleaf, an online, collaborative platform for writing; but since I prefer to do serious work on my physical computer directory rather than in the cloud, I use an app called Textifier that I much prefer to Overleaf when I’m writing alone.

One of the great things about LaTeX is that you aren’t limited to text only. You can produce the graphs, charts, and tables all directly inside the program itself—and they typically look much better (and are much less fragile and fidgety) than anything you would make in Word or Excel. I do also make publication-ready figures in Adobe Illustrator when I need even more visual control; see my article in Georgetown Law Journal for an example of that style of figures.

For example, Figure 1 in the report shows the current living situation of couples in the survey. I could have made that graph in Excel or Datawrapper, then imported it into a Word document. Instead, I produced the figure inside LaTeX using the following code.

What’s great about code, as opposed to word processing software, is that I can send this same simple text to anyone else who uses LaTeX and they will get exactly the same thing I did. In fact, I could send the entire 72 KB text file with the mere 567 KB cover image—together less than 1 MB—and they could reproduce the entire document exactly as I did. Try doing that with a long Word document.

Full and unashamed transparency: although I write LaTeX fairly well myself, I did rely on Claude to build and test a lot of the code I used. But unlike telling AI to simply produce a figure for you, I (and any of you, too) can actually read and check the code that AI produces to ensure accuracy—also something you can’t do well in a more traditional word processor.

And that’s it! If anyone out there writes in LaTeX (or just wants to make jokes about the name), I would love to know in the comments.

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