It is not a bad day to be a homosexual in a bi-national marriage! In the wake of President Obama's decision to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services offices have decided to stop automatically denying green card and immigration applications from gays and lesbians married to U.S. citizens. This comes a week after a Queens court agreed to delay the deportation of an Argentinian woman while the status of her marriage to an American woman from Queens was figured out in light of the sketchy future of DOMA.
Now to be clear, this is not to say that the applications are being accepted. Not at all. What CIS is doing is "holding in abeyance" all decisions on those cases until the status of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act is clarified (i.e. when it hopefully gets struck down). So if you are in a bi-national, homosexual marriage you still want to make sure you've got yourself a good immigration lawyer before you file any paperwork. Because you never know.
But combined with the news that same-sex marriages count in New York (even if they still aren't legal here), this has been a good month for gay marriage.
