Skip to main content

Same-Sex Marriage and Immigrant Rights - the Impact of DOMA on Immigration Reform


by Hiba Ghalib, Associate Attorney

This past weekend was a busy one for both gay rights activists and immigrant advocacy groups.  After the Supreme Court announced last Friday that it had agreed to hear two cases that challenge laws challenging same-sex marriage, over 50 groups supporting gay rights and immigration reform joined together to write a letter to the White House requesting President Obama hold off on deciding any immigration cases involving same sex couples until the Supreme Court issues its decision on gay marriage.

In 1996, Congress enacted the Defense of Marriage Act, most often dubbed DOMA, denying same-sex couples federal benefits, including immigration benefits.  (It was signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton).  This prohibited U.S. Citizens from sponsoring their foreign national spouse for permanent residency if their spouses were of the same sex. To date, the administration continues to enforce DOMA and uses it to routinely deny green card applications from legal same-sex couples, even after the Department of Justice announced in January 2011 that it would no longer defend DOMA in court.  Until a decision is reached questioning the constitutionality of DOMA, the Executive Branch will continue to enforce it. 

Since it has not been long since the recent election cycle and the nonstop campaign ads, the issues the American people find most important are still echoing in our ears.  After the economy - immigration reform, health reform, and gay marriage are among the top issues voters identified as important to the American people. 

While many have criticized the slow progress of immigration reform in recent years (if you can even call it that), it’s not hard to see how quickly the legal climate is changing generally.  Only 26 years ago, the same High Court that has agreed to take a case challenging same-sex marriage upheld laws against sodomy (a decision it reversed in 2003).

Whether or not you support gay marriage, the implications of the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage will clearly have ripple effects that impact immigration reform and groups in support of both have set aside any differences yesterday in recognition of the notion encapsulated by John F. Kennedy: The unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion.”

One can expect that this quick changing legal climate will cause the ‘storm of reform’ that’s currently hovering over the area of gay marriage rights to soon find its way over other lands, including immigration reform, and we can only hope that along with the clouds of change, it will rain down progress.

Read the article HERE.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

If You Are An Immigrant (even a US Citizen), Here Are 9 Things You Should Know

Are you a Naturalized U.S. Citizen, Lawful Permanent Resident, Visa Holder, or an Undocumented Immigrant? We recommend you take the following steps to protect yourself in our current version of America. The last couple of weeks have reminded immigrants, even naturalized U.S. citizens, that they were not born in the United States. Our office has received countless phone calls, emails, and social media messages from people worrying about what their family’s future in the United States holds. Most people want to know what they can do now to protect themselves from what promises to be a wave of anti-immigration activity by the federal government. Trump's Executive Order on Interior Enforcement has some provisions that should make most Americans shiver.  We recommend the following actions for each of the following groups: Naturalized U.S. citizens. In particular if you have a foreign accent, and you are traveling within 100 miles of any US Border (including the oceans

Seven Reasons Why the Georgia Legislature Should Repeal HB-87

Recently the Alabama Attorney General called on the Alabama State Legislature to repeal parts of Alabama's horrid anti-immigration law ( HB 56), because of the "unintended" consequences of the bill (frankly, what happened was not unintended). Because of the similarity between the two laws, Georgia's Speaker of the House, David Ralston was asked whether Georgia Legislature would repeal part or all of HB 87, Georgia own anti-immigration law. HB 87 has caused almost a half a billion dollars in damage to the Georgia economy (along with untold suffering in Georgia's immigrant communities) without any noted or reported positive effect. Speaker Ralston plainly stated that the Georgia Legislature would NOT do anything to repeal HB 87 . While it understandable why a politician would not admit that a pet bill he shepherded and pushed through the state legislature was simply bad law, it is also clear that Speaker Ralston is facing a challenge on his RIGHT in th

How To Stop Illegal Immigration

In the midst of the never ending political season, we hear much rhetoric about immigration, and what candidates will "do" to fix what everyone considers to be a broken (not failed, just broken) immigration system.  Most of the candidates, however, put a condition on fixing this broken system by saying that:  "FIRST, we must secure the border and end illegal immigration, then we will talk."   What will it take to accomplish this precondition to solve a the acknowledged problem. There are two types of "illegal" immigration to the United States.  The first is what everyone already considers to be illegal immigration--those who enter the United States without a visa through our thousands of miles of borders.  Proposals to fix this particular type of illegal immigration range from alligators and moats, to automatic firing machine guns, to “beautiful” walls, to limitless numbers of border patrol agents.  The second type of "illegal" immigratio