In Toure-Davis v. Davis, No. WGC-13-916, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 42522 (D. Md. Mar. 28, 2014), the United States District Court for the District of Maryland addressed whether a prenuptial agreement waiving spousal support can defeat a sponsored immigrant’s right to enforce USCIS Form I-864, Affidavit of Support — and held that on these facts it was the sponsor, not the immigrant, who had given up rights.
A Brief Summary
Nathalie Toure-Davis, a citizen of Côte d’Ivoire, married Charles Davis, a U.S. citizen, in Maryland in 1998. On their wedding day, the couple signed an antenuptial agreement in which each released the other from any claim for alimony or support. The following year, as part of her immigrant visa process, Davis signed a Form I-864 promising to maintain her income at no less than 125 percent of the Federal Poverty Guidelines. She became a lawful permanent resident in 2001; the couple separated the same day and later divorced.
Years later she sued in federal court to enforce the affidavit. Both sides moved for summary judgment. Magistrate Judge William Connelly granted her motion as to liability only, rejecting every defense the sponsor raised and deferring the question of damages to a later round of briefing. The opinion is worth attention less for its outcome than for the number of recurring sponsor defenses it disposes of in a single pass.
Video overview: In this video I explain why Toure-Davis v. Davis is an important Form I-864 enforcement decision, and why the sponsor’s own prenuptial agreement did not save him.
Why This Decision Matters
The affidavit is a contract — but not only a contract
The court begins with a framing point that is easy to skim past: the Form I-864 is “the product of these legal mandates.” The affidavit did not exist before Congress created it in 1996. What we actually have is a federal statute, implementing regulations at 8 C.F.R. Part 213a, and the form itself — and it is the form that imposes the obligation on the sponsor.
That matters because interpreting the affidavit means doing two things at once: reading a contract, and implementing a congressional mandate. And when Congress legislates on immigration it does so at the zenith of its power. Sponsors sometimes argue as though the I-864 were an ordinary private agreement between two people. It is an unusual instrument precisely because it is not.
Divorce is not on the list
The opinion recites the five events that end a sponsor’s obligation: the immigrant naturalizes, earns forty qualifying quarters, loses permanent residence and departs the United States, obtains a new grant of adjustment after becoming removable, or dies. Divorce appears nowhere on that list, and as the court notes, the current form says so in terms: “divorce does not terminate your obligations under this Form I-864.”
Sponsors frequently respond that nobody told them. But the terminating events are stated in the contract they signed. American contract law asks whether a party objectively manifested assent, not whether they read carefully — the same rule that governs a credit card agreement or a speed limit sign. If anything the rule binds harder here, because a congressional mandate stands behind the document.
The waiver argument — and the sponsor who waived first
The sponsor’s central defense was the antenuptial agreement: his ex-wife had promised never to seek support from him, and here she was in federal court seeking support. He leaned on Blain v. Herrell, an unpublished decision from the District of Hawaii that had suggested a premarital agreement could waive I-864 rights.
The court gave three reasons for declining to follow it. Blain is unpublished and from outside the district, so its force is purely persuasive. Its discussion of the antenuptial agreement is dicta — the court there had already granted the plaintiff’s motion to withdraw and continued only “for completeness of the record.” And on the merits, the reasoning did not persuade.
Then came the move that decided the issue. Davis signed the antenuptial agreement in July 1998 and the Form I-864 in October 1999. Because the affidavit came second, the court held, it modified the earlier agreement: by signing the I-864 he promised the United States that he would support her until a terminating event occurred, and granted her, as a third-party beneficiary, the right to sue. “There is a waiver in this litigation,” the court wrote, “but it is Defendant, and not Plaintiff, who has waived his rights.” The court added that his later conduct — agreeing in both the separation and divorce agreements to pay alimony and support — independently waived the antenuptial bar.
This reasoning is sound as far as it goes, and it is worth being precise about how far that is. It protects the sponsored immigrant where the prenuptial agreement was signed before the affidavit. Reverse the order and the Toure-Davis rationale does not reach the case. The court did not decide whether a premarital agreement can ever waive rights under the Form I-864. The Ninth Circuit later answered that harder question in Erler v. Erler, holding that it cannot; Maryland still has no decision squarely on the point, though the direction of this opinion is not difficult to read.
Equitable estoppel goes nowhere
The sponsor also argued estoppel — that after litigating the divorce and sitting on her rights, it was a bait and switch for his ex-wife to surface the affidavit years later in federal court. The argument failed on two levels. Procedurally, the defense consisted of block quotations from the antenuptial agreement with no argument connecting them to detrimental reliance, and the party asserting estoppel bears the burden. Substantively, estoppel targets a party who takes one position and later takes an inconsistent one; that the antenuptial agreement addressed marital property and alimony says nothing inconsistent about a federal support obligation that was never before the family court.
The move that underpins nearly every plaintiff win
If one sentence from this opinion belongs in a brief, it is this: the obligation of support imposed by federal law “is separate and apart from any obligation of support imposed under Maryland law or right to support waived by the parties via an ante-nuptial agreement.”
Federal courts make this move again and again, and it is close to uncontroversial once stated. The I-864 obligation did not exist in state or federal law until Congress created it in 1996. Nothing in state family law speaks to it. A sponsor who wants to defeat the affidavit with a family-law argument is reaching for the wrong body of law.
Who the duty is actually owed to
The court also identifies whose benefit the obligation serves, quoting the Seventh Circuit: the sponsor’s duty exists “for the benefit of federal and state taxpayers and of the donors to organizations that provide charity for the poor.” The purpose of the affidavit is to keep sponsored immigrants from becoming public charges, and the mechanism is a binding support contract signed before the immigrant is admitted.
That framing does real work. Because the promise runs to the government, the sponsor “cannot absolve himself of his contractual obligation with the U.S. Government by Plaintiff purportedly waiving any right to alimony or support.” The court cited the district court’s decision in Erler v. Erler for the same proposition — a decision later affirmed by the Ninth Circuit.
Quoting the District of New Jersey’s decision in Shah v. Shah, the court added that allowing an undisclosed prenuptial agreement to defeat enforcement “would undermine the purpose of the statute,” because Congress required that the affidavit be enforceable by the sponsored immigrant at the moment it is submitted.
Consider what the alternative would look like in practice. If a sponsor could sign an affidavit and immediately waive it, every immigration firm in the country would keep two stacks of paper — affidavits of support, and waivers to be signed the moment the ink dried. The obligation Congress designed as a safeguard would become a formality. Courts decline to read the statute that way for exactly that reason.
Raising the affidavit in family court does not spend it
The sponsor argued that because his ex-wife had mentioned the affidavit during the state divorce proceedings, she could not litigate it again. The court disagreed: the affidavit may have been referenced, but no final judgment on the merits of the support obligation was ever entered, and preclusion requires one.
This pattern is common. A sponsored immigrant without income, often without fluent English and without a copy of the affidavit — it was filed with the government, not given to her — raises everything she can think of in a hearing on temporary alimony, including something about a form her sponsor signed. Sponsors later characterize that as a spent claim. Toure-Davis says a passing reference is not a judgment.
Leaving the country is not, by itself, a terminating event
Toure-Davis returned to Côte d’Ivoire with her children for roughly eighteen months. Conditions there deteriorated and she came back to the United States, where she was placed in removal proceedings on an allegation that she had abandoned her residence. She prevailed; the immigration judge terminated the proceedings and she retained her status.
The sponsor argued a terminating event had occurred. The court rejected that: her permanent residence had not been lost, and the regulation requires both loss of status and departure. This is worth committing to memory, because sponsors raise it constantly whenever a client has spent significant time abroad. Time outside the United States does not, on its own, end anyone’s status — that takes a finding by an immigration judge.
The sponsor’s fallback was due process: he was not a party to the removal proceeding and had no opportunity to argue that she had abandoned residence. The court held he had no protected interest in participating. Removal proceedings are between the government and the noncitizen; the financial consequence to a sponsor does not buy him a seat at that table or a right to relitigate the result.
Practical Takeaways
- Check the order of signature before conceding a prenuptial-agreement defense. Toure-Davis holds that an affidavit signed after a premarital agreement modifies it, which means the sequence of documents can decide the issue without reaching the harder question of whether a prenup could ever waive I-864 rights.
- A sponsor’s conduct can waive the very agreement he relies on. Davis agreed to pay alimony and support in both the separation and divorce agreements, and the court treated that course of conduct as an independent waiver of the antenuptial bar.
- Frame the obligation as federal, not marital, at every opportunity. The proposition that the I-864 duty is separate and apart from state-law support rights underpins most plaintiff-side victories, and it is difficult to contest once stated plainly.
- The promise runs to the government, which is why private waivers fail. A sponsor cannot release himself from a contract with the United States by obtaining a release from the immigrant, and courts resist readings that would let sponsors nullify the obligation the moment they undertake it.
- A mention in family court is not a judgment. Preclusion requires a final judgment on the merits of the support obligation, so raising the affidavit among other arguments in a state alimony hearing does not forfeit a later federal claim.
- Time abroad does not terminate the affidavit unless status is actually lost. The regulation requires both loss of permanent residence and departure, and loss of status takes a finding by an immigration judge — not a sponsor’s assertion.
- Sponsors have no due-process right to participate in the beneficiary’s removal case. An adverse financial consequence flowing from an immigration ruling does not give the sponsor standing to attack that ruling in the enforcement action.
- Read this decision for liability only. The court expressly deferred damages, directing both parties to document, year by year, the income the beneficiary received and the support the sponsor provided — the offset questions that decide what these cases are actually worth.
Credit where it’s due: the plaintiff in Toure-Davis was represented by Edward W. Neufville, III, of Silver Spring, Maryland, who did some of the important early litigation in the affidavit-of-support context. This decision came down in 2014, when very few courts had yet examined the Form I-864 in any depth, and the record he built here holds up.
