First Class Citizen: Green Card Denied

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Green Card Denied

Amsterdam, 20 January 2013

On November 7, 2013, the day after President Obama was re-elected, our lawyer submitted our application for an I-130 visa.

On Friday 18 of January we received the message that it had taken the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services just 4 weeks to determine that Martha and I, as two women, were not married in the way that U.S. immigration law understands marriage and that the green card is denied.

Come on!

Can you seriously say that our marriage of nearly 12 years, performed in the Netherlands in May 2001, is not really a marriage.

That is absurd.

Marriage is a blessing in my life. I love being married to Martha. I love knowing that we will share our lives, forever, and that people will always support us in keeping our love alive.

How incongruous that the United States law does not respect Martha, while Dutch law does.

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On The Move

My name is Lin McDevitt-Pugh. I'm Australian. Martha McDevitt-Pugh is my wife and she petitioned at the end of 2012 for a green card for me. She is a U.S. citizen. Our marriage is not recognized under U.S. federal law, because we are two women. Martha founded Love Exiles, a community of thousands of people who had to choose between love and their country.

You can invite us to talk on this issue.

Last year I came through U.S. Customs and Immigration on my own, preceding my annual visit to my in-laws, and I caught myself thinking: What if they ask me why I am coming, and what if I say the usual? Will they let me into the country, or will they treat me as a threat to overstaying?

This thought enters my head every time I enter the country my wife was born in and has no right to live in with me. I have had it with that thought. I want to be able to enter the United States the way any spouse of a U.S. citizen enters the country and even more, I want my wife to have the right to live in the U.S.A. herself.

Here's what usually happens when I enter the U.S.

The immigration official asks what I am coming to do. I say I am visiting my in-laws. I then say that my wife is a U.S. citizen, born and raised in California, and that she does not have the right to sponsor me to live with her in the U.S.A. because our marriage of 11 years is not recognized by U.S. law.

Standing in line waiting to go through Immigration at Dallas, Texas, I decided it was time for Martha and I to be treated as first class citizens.

We approached Lavi Soloway, the lawyer for friends of ours also going through the green card process. Sign us up too, we said. Now, together with 58 other couples, we are on the road to having our green cards this year. This is the future we are standing in. It will happen.

This blog documents the progress.