Draconian Discrimination: One Man's Battle With U.S. Immigration Law For Fairness, Justice, And American Citizenship

In March 2012 — fifteen months before the Supreme Court's June 2013 Windsor decision struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act — same-sex binational couples in the United States had no path to immigration sponsorship through marriage. A U.S. citizen could marry a same-sex foreign national in one of the states or jurisdictions that recognised it, but DOMA Section 3 prohibited the federal government from recognising the marriage for any federal-law purpose, including the immigration sponsorship that opposite-sex spouses routinely received.

The UNROW Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic at American University Washington College of Law was one of the legal-clinical programmes working on cases at this intersection — DOMA-era family separation cases, asylum claims by LGBT applicants, and the broader human-rights framing of U.S. immigration practice. Stop the Deportations: The DOMA Project, founded by Lavi Soloway in 2010, had become the principal legal-aid network for these cases and was filing administrative-appeal and stay-of-removal petitions to keep families together until a legal change came.

The post-Windsor immigration-recognition guidance from USCIS and DHS in July 2013 retroactively cured many of these cases — but for the families described in this kind of mid-2012 reporting, the period before the ruling was structured around buying time, hoping for executive forbearance, and assembling the evidentiary record for whatever legal theory might survive the next court ruling.