Feds say former Florida mayor lived a 30-year lie, move to strip him of citizenship

From the moment Philippe Bien-Aime stepped foot in the United States on July 25, 1995, immigration authorities, say the Haitian native has been living a lie.

The former mayor of North Miami arrived in the U.S. with his photo on someone else’s passport, authorities say in a federal lawsuit seeking to strip Bien-Aime of his citizenship. As part of his naturalization process, they add, Bien-Aime, 60, has lied about who and how many women he’s married and divorced and also about how many children he has had with them.

He used his original name, Jean Philippe Janvier, in a 2000 deportation case in which a U.S. immigration judge ordered his return to Haiti — though he never moved back to his country. Instead, he used a new name, Philippe Bien-Aime, on a naturalization application in 2005 after he married a U.S. citizen. He also used that name when he won the mayoral election in North Miami in 2019, after six years on the city council.

An immigration officer said in an affidavit filed in federal court in Miami this week that as part of the naturalization process, “Bien-Aime was not eligible to receive a visa as the spouse of a U.S. citizen because his marriage to the U.S. citizen … was bigamous and invalid” – pointing out that he lied about being divorced from his Haitian wife. “Bien-Aime was not legally free to marry” the U.S. citizen or allowed to attain an immigration benefit through a “bigamous marriage,” the officer said in the affidavit supporting the federal lawsuit.

Adding to the intrigue are court documents that say that, under the name Jean Philippe Janvier, he married Sarahjane Ternier, and under the name Philippe Bien-Aime, he married Beatrice Gelin — both on the same date, June 20, 1993, in Port-au-Prince.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida/2026/02/24/florida-mayor-immigration-citizenship-naturalization/