'You can go. He can stay.'
June 23, 2009
WASHINGTON, D.C. - A foreigner who marries a U.S. citizen is entitled to become a permanent U.S. resident. Yet, our own immigration service has been trying to deport several hundred widows and a few widowers – foreigners who had been married to American citizens when the Americans died.
To illustrate, here’s a little story from a June 14 CBS 60 Minutes rebroadcast:
Raquel Williams, a young nursing student from Brazil, was visiting Florida when, one night, she and three girl friends drove into a gas station. They caught the eye of a car full of guys who were also getting gas.
"I guess they noticed that we were, you know, not from here," Raquel remembers, recalling when she first met her future husband. That chance meeting with Derek Williams led to love, marriage, and eventually parenthood. Two years after they met, their son Ian was born.
But then the unthinkable happened.
Raquel told 60- Minutes she woke up about 4:30 a.m. one morning to find her husband lying on the couch. She could see something was wrong. He wasn’t breathing. Raquel called 911. “Please, please,” she pleaded, “come fast. Fast.”
But he was already gone. Derek had insomnia, so he'd watch TV on their couch during the night. But he also had breathing problems and an irregular heartbeat, which proved fatal.
After he died, Raquel and Ian moved in with Derek's parents. And three months after Derek died, Raquel finally had the immigration interview that she had been seeking for a year – to gain status as a permanent U.S. resident.
She went to the interview with Ian, and brought all the documentation needed to prove she had been married to Derek; she also brought the death certificate.
Her case was denied. “They said, 'You're gonna have to go back to Brazil.' And I said, 'I have my son. You know? This is my son. He's [ an ] American citizen.' And they said that, 'You can go. He can stay.'"
Ian was five months old at the time.
Raquel found herself caught in what’s now referred to by many as the widow penalty - when a surviving spouse faces deportation because they had yet to be married two full years when their American husband or wife died.
“Tragically, there are hundreds of cases in which men and women are crying out for common sense and reason to prevail,” U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said today, in advance of a public meeting Tuesday with other women who find themselves in Raquel’s situation.
The Florida Democrat and U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern ( D-MA ) are seeking their legislative remedy - the Fairness to Surviving Spouses Act – to end the widow penalty. The two lawmakers will be joined Tuesday by Diana Engstrom, whose husband was killed working with the Army in Iraq, and Natalia Goukassian, a Florida woman who, like Raquel, lost her American husband and then found the federal government moving to deport her.
Natalia will be speaking publicly for the first time.
She is but one of a few hundred spouses of deceased Americans whose legal status hangs in the balance, but her story is illustrative. Natalia came into the country legally from Russia and met her future husband. They married on June 30, 2006, and soon after they filed for Natalia’s permanent resident status in the Orlando office of Citizenship and Immigration Services. Tigran died on December 1, 2006 of an aggressive form of cancer related to his service in the U.S. military.
Natalia was denied in March 2009. For now she is here legally, but that status soon will end.
Widows and widowers facing deportation were given a potential life-line on June 9, when the Obama administration put plans to send them to their home country on hold. But the administration says they’ll need a permanent fix, legislation from Congress, to be able to keep them in the country.
Enter Nelson in the Senate and McGovern in the House.
Under their legislation, surviving spouses would still need to prove their marriage was a bona fide marriage before receiving a green card. Thus, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would retain the discretion to deny petitions, but they would no longer deny them automatically in response to the death of the citizen spouse.
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