Darren Mccollester / Getty Images file
Greg Kimball and Brian O’Connor shout outside the Massachusetts State House on June 14, 2007 in Boston, Mass. On May 31, 2012, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutionally denies married same-sex couples federal benefits.
A Filipino woman who married her American wife in 2008, when it was briefly legal to do so in the state of California, should not be denied immigration rights that heterosexual couples receive and should not be deported, her lawyers are arguing in a lawsuit.
Jane DeLeon, who came to the U.S. in 1989, her son, Martin Aranas, and her spouse, Irma Rodriguez, are suing the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, among others, for their implementation of the Defense of Marriage Act. The lawsuit was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Western Division.
The suit joins several others targeting DOMA, the federal law banning same-sex marriages, including one filed by binational gay couples in New York. The Obama administration has asked the Supreme Court to take up two of those cases: one originating in Massachusetts and another in California, according to scotusblog.
“ … [T]the lawsuit alleges that the Administration has refused to implement a nationwide program to place same sex marriage immigration cases on hold while the courts determine DOMA’s constitutionality,” the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the family along with others, said in a statement, echoing complaints made by other same-sex marriage immigration groups.
“While the Administration has stated that it would review gay marriage cases on a ‘case-by-case’ individual basis, the plaintiffs claim that many immigrants cannot afford to retain lawyers to prepare the materials needed for an individualized discretionary case-by-case determination, and in any event many immigrants are afraid to come forward and expose themselves to detention or deportation,”
This article originally appeared on: http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/13/12726303-same-sex-couple-sues-to-stop-deportation?lite