Thomas Breen Photo
Patricia Clark in her office before retiring: “Yelled” at applicants when “she did not believe them.”
“Happy Hunting!” wrote New Haven’s vital statistics chief Patricia Clark to a federal investigator as she reported yet another immigrant getting married in City Hall.
The city released a 41-page investigatory report on Friday finding that Clark committed misconduct by reporting 93 marriage-seeking couples to federal immigration authorities and denying services to constituents arbitrarily.
Meanwhile, officials announced that Clark evaded disciplinary action by retiring in late February, the day she faced a hearing.
Mayor Justin Elicker and city Health Director Maritza Bond released the report at a Friday afternoon press conference.
“We aim to create a safe, welcoming, and caring place for everyone,” said Bond, whose department encompasses the vital statistics office and who has been serving as the acting registrar in place of Clark. “We are committed to doing better and will share how we are making better.”
The city published the investigation into Clark’s actions, conducted by the Hartford-based company New Light Investigations, three months after Clark was originally placed on paid administrative leave in early December for potentially violating New Haven’s Sanctuary City executive order.
Read the investigatory report here.
As the registrar of vital statistics, Clark issued marriage licenses as well as birth and death certificates to city residents. She was also in charge of the Elm City ID program, a municipal identification program designed to be inclusive of undocumented immigrants.
Clark had been reporting couples seeking a marriage license whom she suspected of immigration fraud to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) investigator Ellis O’Briant, despite the city’s mandate that employees not inquire about or report the immigration status of constituents.
She had also unilaterally required additional documents from some constituents, including birth certificates for marriage license applicants coming from out of the country or state, and waivers from the Department of Community Resilience from formerly incarcerated applicants for Elm City ID cards.
The investigation found that she had been scanning documents from couples including a non-citizen, such as birth certificates, social security cards, and bank records, and sending them to O’Briant.
She would deny applicants who did not have documents that satisfied her, even if they had provided all of the documents officially required, according to the report. Constituents were denied licenses and ID cards for “any number of reasons,” according to the investigation, “including that she perceived the documents were fake, the couple was lying, or that they could not prove where they lived.”
She also imposed a $20 “search fee” associated with some documents without permission or basis.
At the press conference, Elicker said that Clark “acted inappropriately” and “operated under the belief that she had unrestricted authority to enact policies and procedures in the Office of Vital Statistics regardless of their compliance with state regulations, city ordinances, or approval from her supervisors.”
Maritza Bond and Justin Elicker.
Elicker stressed that “New Haven is a welcoming city,” and that “it can happen that sometimes employees do not comport to the standards that we have.”
“In those instances,” he said, “we must hold them accountable and take corrective action. That is very much what we did in these circumstances.”
Elicker and Bond said the city does not know what has happened to the couples whom Clark reported, despite the city’s attempts to reach out to USCIS for more information.
After receiving the results of the investigation, the city issued a letter to Clark on Feb. 21 and scheduled a “Loudermill” disciplinary hearing for Feb. 26 to give Clark a chance to respond to allegations before supervisors took any action.
The morning of the hearing, Clark chose to retire, escaping all potential disciplinary consequences.
“Ms. Clark chose not to refute, or explain, or otherwise respond to or provide mitigating evidence to the findings, and instead chose to retire,” Elicker said.
Clark did not respond to a request for comment for this story. In the report, she denied having singled out particular ethnic or cultural groups.
Clark's Concerns, Not Actions, Deemed "Reasonable"
The city found that Clark had reported a total of 93 couples during her tenure — 9.3 percent of all couples who had sought licenses from her department.
Between August and late November of 2023, Clark reported 73 out of 215 couples applying for a marriage license.
All of the couples whom Clark reported involved at least one spouse who was an immigrant.
About 80 percent of the couples included someone who had immigrated from India.
According to the investigators’ interview with assistant registrars, Clark denied marriage licenses to some applicants who could not provide their mothers’ maiden names, even as the report notes “it is not customary for an Indian woman to take a last name until she marries” in some regions. Assistant Registrar Lizaida Andujar said that Clark would “yell” at applicants when “she did not believe them.”
The report found that there may have been a basis for Clark to suspect marriage fraud in some cases.
The number of marriage license requests received by the department approximately doubled to five or six per day around February of 2023.
“The requests particularly involved older Indian men, approximately in their thirties, residing in New York, New Jersey, Texas, and Utah. 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,” the report read.
The investigation concluded that “while Clark’s concerns about the applicants were reasonable, the actions she took to address those concerns were not reasonable or justified.”
Clark Ignored State Instructions, Created "Hostile" Workplace
Laura Glesby Photo
A protest for immigrant rights outside City Hall following the revelation of Clark's immigration reports.
Throughout the investigation, according to the report, Clark maintained that she had been acting on state guidance. She cited a February 2023 email from State Department of Health employee Katie Sehi indicating that she “should” report “suspicious” marriage to USCIS.
The investigation revealed that Clark had in fact received multiple emails to the contrary during the summer and early fall of 2023 from the state Registrar of Vital Statistics, Yvette Gauthier. Gauthier told Clark that she should not “police marriage” and that she should leave questions of fraudulence up to the legal system.
Yet Clark continued to report marriages involving non-citizens to USCIS, writing notes such as “Happy hunting!” and “Enjoy!” to O’Briant.
“She went way, way, beyond what any of us would view as appropriate without seeking any guidance or support,” Elicker said at the press conference.
The report also details allegations of a “hostile” work environment that Clark fostered, based on interviews with her assistant registrars. The registrars said that Clark frequently yelled, occasionally made employees cry, and made demeaning comments about Latino people.
“If anyone in the office failed to make copies of the documents” that Clark mandated for a marriage license, the report wrote, “Clark would yell at them because they were not complying with her directives.”
Clark did not respond to a request for comment in time for this story and the report did not include her perspective on these allegations. She did tell investigators in an interview that she believed she had been hired to “clean up” the office of Vital Statistics and did not expect to receive “significant oversight,” as the report summarizes her saying.
I suspect some readers will wonder whether Clark's pension can be reduced or revoked. The answer is almost certainly no. The state law on the subject (CGS Sec. 1-110 et seq.) is intentionally very narrow. It only applies when a public official or employee has been convicted (or pleaded nolo contendre) to specific job-related crimes such as embezzlement. No one has suggested that Clark had committed such crimes. The law was passed in response to the Gov. Rowland scandals, although it was prospective and did not apply to his crimes.
One editorial complaint. The first subhead (likely not written by Laura) is misleading. It implies that the investigation found that Clark's concerns were reasonable in all or most cases. Instead it found that this was true for a subset of those couples that Clark reported to USCIS.