Discussion What to do when the government breaks the law? -- Gay couple sues State Department for denying daughter's citizenship

[Indus]

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/24/us/gay-couple-daughter-citizenship-lawsuit/index.html

A gay married couple in Georgia sued the US State Department on Wednesday for refusing to recognize their daughter as a citizen.

Derek Mize and Jonathan Gregg, who married in New York in 2015, had their daughter Simone Mize-Gregg via surrogacy in England in 2018, their lawyer said in a statement. Both fathers are listed on the birth certificate.

When they applied for Simone's US citizenship, the US consulate in London rejected their application, the release said. "The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) states that children of married U.S. citizens born abroad are U.S. citizens from birth so long as one of their parents has lived in the U.S. at some point, but the State Department routinely denies that right to same-sex couples and their children," the statement says.

"The State Department's policy is not only cruel, it is unconstitutional. The government refuses to recognize Jonathan and Derek's marriage and all of Simone's rights as a U.S. citizen," Aaron C. Morris, one of the couple's attorneys and executive director of Immigration Equality, said.




Umm what the fuck? The law clearly states:

https://travel.state.gov/content/tr...isition-US-Citizenship-Child-Born-Abroad.html

Birth Abroad Out-of-Wedlock to a U.S. Citizen Father – “New” Section 309(a)

A person born abroad out-of-wedlock to a U.S. citizen father may acquire U.S. citizenship under Section 301(c) or 301(g) of the INA, as made applicable by the “new” Section 309(a) of the INA if:

1. A blood relationship between the person and the father is established by clear and convincing evidence;
2. The father had the nationality of the United States at the time of the person’s birth;
3. The father (unless deceased) has agreed in writing to provide financial support for the person until the person reaches the age of 18 years, and
4. While the person is under the age of 18 years --

• the person is legitimated under the law of his/her residence or domicile,
• the father acknowledges paternity of the person in writing under oath, or
• the paternity of the person is established by adjudication of a competent court.

What a surprise.. for the government that says people are breaking the law.. they forget The government is breaking the law?

 

[Sunburn74]

Seems pretty straightforward that they will win the case. Of course us taxpayers will be paying for this administrations bigotry.

 

[UNCjigga]

Seems pretty straightforward that they will win the case. Of course us taxpayers will be paying for this administrations bigotry.

Did this State Dept “practice” of denying citizenship to children born abroad to same-sex parents start with the Trump Admin? I wasn’t clear if that’s the case, or if this is just a holdover from pre-gay marriage policies under previous State Depts.

 

[Indus]

Did this State Dept “practice” of denying citizenship to children born abroad to same-sex parents start with the Trump Admin? I wasn’t clear if that’s the case, or if this is just a holdover from pre-gay marriage policies under previous State Depts.

It started with the Trump administration because I know that gay couples could have kids via surrogacy before and they were granted citizenship.

 

[Jhhnn]

Every chickenshit maneuver they can muster. They know they'll lose. There is no objective other than to inflict pain.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Didn't they also start denying same sex spouses of state department employees citizenship? I seem to remember a hubbub over that. I think they tried claiming that if it happened in a country that hadn't legalized same sex marriage they'd consider it invalid. Their "fix" for the complaints I think then turned into denying all spouses or some other fucking stupid thing because instead of walking back bad policy they decided that they'd just shit on as many as they could.

Wasn't even citizenship, but rather, visas:
http://www.portvapes.co.uk/?id=Latest-exam-1Z0-876-Dumps&exid=thread...-unmarried-gay-partners-of-diplomats.2554773/

Random thought. I wonder how many anti-immigrant dumbshits hear "visas" and think the credit card like the people are being given free money?

 

[Indus]

Didn't they also start denying same sex spouses of state department employees citizenship? I seem to remember a hubbub over that. I think they tried claiming that if it happened in a country that hadn't legalized same sex marriage they'd consider it invalid. Their "fix" for the complaints I think then turned into denying all spouses or some other fucking stupid thing because instead of walking back bad policy they decided that they'd just shit on as many as they could.

I'm not a state department official but I faced the same issue. We got around that by using a fiance visa and marrying stateside.

 

[Indus]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/state...uples-your-out-of-wedlock-kids-arent-citizens

Apparently this isn't the first case.

From the article:

When Roee and Adiel Kiviti brought home their newborn daughter Kessem two months ago, they figured that they were as ready as they could be. After all, they’d gone through the same process two years earlier with their son Lev, who, like Kessem, was born with the help of an egg donor and a gestational surrogate in Canada.

“It was as straightforward as one can imagine,” Roee told The Daily Beast, recalling the ease of bringing Lev home in late 2016, the infant’s newly printed Canadian passport in hand, soon to be supplanted by an American one. But this February, when Kessem’s fathers contacted the U.S. consulate in Calgary to obtain a Consular Report of Birth Abroad for their daughter—the legal equivalent of a birth certificate for Americans born outside of the United States—something was different this time.

“They first indicated that they needed proof of our marriage, which I found quite odd,” Roee said. “They needed the original marriage certificate, which we didn’t have with us, but I didn’t actually think anything more about it. I thought, ‘We don’t have time for this, we’ll just deal with it in the U.S.’”

Roee and Adiel obtained Kessem’s Canadian passport—a stopgap, they figured, until they could get her U.S. passport back home—and traveled back to their home in the United States.

But Kessem was about to become the latest victim of a government policy that effectively de-recognizes her parents’ marriage, granting her no automatic rights to American birthright citizenship despite the fact that both her fathers are U.S. citizens. That policy, Kessem’s fathers told The Daily Beast, poses a unique threat to LGBT families, and could change the decades-old legal understanding of what the word “family” even means.

“This is a very clear attack on families, on American families,” Roee, who married Adiel in California in 2013, told The Daily Beast. “Denying American married couples their rights to pass their citizenship, that is flat-out discrimination, and everyone should be concerned about this.”



For years, President Donald Trump has called for the elimination of birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants who are born on American soil. Those children, slurred as “anchor babies,” are accused of being birthed with the sole purpose of tethering their non-citizen parents to the United States.

The Trump administration’s promised executive orders ending this “loophole” have not materialized, but the president’s war on birthright citizenship has many fronts—and one little-noticed State Department policy, first implemented in 2014, has now resulted in a reverse version of Trump’s “anchor baby” scenario, where the children of U.S. citizens born abroad are effectively being stopped at the border.

That policy unilaterally changed the department’s interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), a 1952 law that, along with the 14th Amendment, codifies eligibility for U.S. birthright citizenship.

“The U.S. Department of State interprets the INA to mean that a child born abroad must be biologically related to a U.S. citizen parent,” the State Department’s website says. “Even if local law recognizes a surrogacy agreement and finds that U.S. parents are the legal parents of a child conceived and born abroad… if the child does not have a biological connection to a U.S. citizen parent, the child will not be a U.S. citizen at birth.”

The Kivitis are each biologically related to their children. Under the policy, however, children born via gestational surrogacy and other forms of assisted reproductive technology (ART) are considered to be born “out of wedlock,” in the State Department’s words—even if their parents, like Roee and Adiel, are legally married.

“They basically take our marriage, and they say ‘It doesn’t mean anything. Your child was born out of wedlock,’” Adiel said. “We were there when she was born, she took her first breaths in our arms. Make no mistake: We are her parents—we are her only parents on her only birth certificate.”

 

[dainthomas]

If something like this happens under the Trump administration, it's a feature not a bug.