A Heartbreaking Picture of Discrimination is Worth a Thousand Words

 have you tried making a petition?  I know it may seem like a small thing to do, but if enough people signed it and it was sent to the right person you’re case might be reconsidered.  She sounds like the kind of person who we should want in this country. 

 I can understand the part about how your father’s daughter lives in Colorado, so moving isn’t an option, but as someone who has a foreign partner who is British, I can tell you that emigrating to the UK hasn’t been as difficult as people make it out to be. The biggest problem is the expense of applying for visas. But the UK does recognize marriages, civil unions, and domestic partnerships from the states that offer them as legal civil partnerships in the UK, which sounds like you should qualify for. I suppose the other issue might be that they want to make sure you have enough money to live off us. Luckily for us, my partner already had a job in the UK when he moved back.

Good luck though! As a fellow American with a British partner, I can completely empathize with your situation. It’s definitely not easy to be told that your marriage isn’t enough to get your partner a green card!

Actually, it depends on what country you’re from. My husband and I were married for 5 years and paid hundreds of dollars and filled out reams of paperwork before he even got his green card. And he was here legally on a student visa, then a work visa, pending political asylum from Bosnia. It was another five years before he was able to become a citizen. We even had a child and had documentation of us living together for over 13 years and it was still a struggle. In the end, it cost us about a thousand dollars in application and renewal fees and more paperwork than I care to remember to get it done.

It’s horrible that they don’t recognize same sex marriage and are breaking up families. There were times that I feared what would happen if my husband were deported when we had a small child while still waiting for his citizenship to be approved. I can only imagine how devastating this is for both of them. So wrong.

The immigration laws are kind of fucked, in my opinion. I lived in fear that my husband would be deported as we waited a decade for his citizenship to be approved, even though we had a young child.

For example, there was a young German woman who was adopted and brought to Georgia. As a (heterosexually) married mother of two, she applied for citizenship. Instead, she was ordered deported because, as a teenager, she had entered a guilty plea to charges stemming from pulling the hair of another girl over the affections of a boy. Her husband and kids can stay here, but she has to leave. Even though she doesn’t even speak German and obviously has no where to live there, since she was adopted as an infant. 

The second, a young mother in Falls Church, Va., faces deportation and separation from her children because she called the police after being brutally beaten by her husband. Instead of coming to her defense, police arrested her because she bit her husband as he sat on her and repeatedly hit her.

Another married woman with two kids (who’d been adopted as a 5 month old from Mexico) stole a purse with two bottles of prescription pills in it and was charged with drug trafficking, even though she never sold a pill. She also faces deportation. She was adopted by US citizens, married to one, and gave birth to two… and had no idea that she wasn’t a citizen herself. Granted she was poor and uneducated. Once she found out her problem, it was too late, although she couldn’t have afforded the application fees anyway. She doesn’t speak Spanish or know anyone in Mexico. Still, for stealing a purse, she faces being deported. Can you imagine trying to survive in a foreign country, with nothing, not speaking the language or knowing anyone?

46,000 parents of children who are US citizen were deported in the first six months of 2011, according to the ARC. Not all of those were single parents. My cousin’s husband was deported to Guatemala that year, leaving her with three small children. They were married, poor, and not very smart and thought that just getting married would automatically give him citizenship. They were wrong. Now she’s on welfare. 

Unfortunately, heterosexual marriage doesn’t guarantee you won’t have your family ripped apart either.

Still, it breaks my heart to see this loving family torn apart just because they’re a same sex couple and unrecognized by the federal government.

Not sure where you got their information but being married gay or straight does not get you citizenship. My brother in law is French and still had to apply for citizenship in the US as well as have a sponsor other than his wife while he waited for all of the paperwork. While I agree this is tragic it is not a gay/ straight thing.