DENIED: Obama Admin Immigration Decision Puts Couples in Limbo
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Obama administration is standing firm against calls by LGBT rights groups and lawmakers to put a blanket hold on deciding green card petitions from married, binational gay couples. Instead, those petitions in all likelihood will continue to be rejected, denying much-needed stability for gay families stuck in the nation’s immigration system.
While the administration has taken affirmative steps in recent months to ensure that foreign nationals married to American spouses of the same sex are spared from actual deportation, officials told LGBT rights groups in a recent, high-level meeting that they will not hold such marriage-based green card petitions in abeyance. The decision is being criticized by some advocates as a campaign-year calculation based on politics, not on sound legal analysis.
A year ago today, Atty. Gen. Eric Holder announced that the Obama administration would not defend a section of the Defense of Marriage Act that bars gay married couples from full federal rights and responsibilities of civil marriage. Those rights include the ability to sponsor a foreign spouse for permanent residency in the United States.
The administration has since pledged to continue enforcing the law, though it has declined to defend DOMA in multiple lawsuits and has worked around some of the 1996 law’s more severe consequences. President Obama issued a 2010 memo mandating hospital visitation rights for LGBT partners and spouses, for example, while the Justice Department dropped its opposition last year against joint bankruptcy filings by gay couples. But providing broad immigration relief to gay binational couples as DOMA’s constitutionality is decided appears to be a bridge too far at this point.
http://www.advocate.com/Politics/Officials_Deny_Broad_Immigration_Relief_to_Gay_Binational_Couples/
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A friend told me that his binational married friends have been approached to see if they wish to challenge some aspect of these discriminatory immigration laws. I'm not sure how this happened, or why them, since they aren't people anyone would have necessarily heard of, but I found it interesting, since it's unlikely they would have been contacted unless the odds of winning such a challenge were better than 50/50.
Yes, there are probably 100's of such couples; the larger point is, the prevailing view seems to be that these challenges increasingly are winning ones for the GLBT community. 