From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 5 of 5)
(This 5-part story, renamed ‘From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented,’ originally appeared in its entirety on medium.com/@gabriellabregman as ‘Becoming Undocumented: Getting My Status and Identity Back After DOMA’s Demise’ on Dec. 12, 2015)
After losing money on a lawyer in 2015, I am set to file for both the U-Visa and VAWA, (both kept extremely secretive as options throughout ones immigration process, as well as the combination of both as a possibility,) with an immigration lawyer in 2016, yet under the Violence Against Women Act ones marriage still has to be “bona fide,” and not solely for immigration purposes, so in essence I technically still have to evade questions and lie in answering anything regarding my true sexual orientation, (and my gender identity does show, with or without medical procedures, which I don’t feel I need since feeling more gender nonconforming than solely male or female,) and so is still retroactive punishment as post-DOMA backlash.
Ultimately it entirely comes down to this, your ability to be and stay legally in the US, because of the Immigration Fraud Act of 1986, depends solely on your ability to fall in love and have an American citizen fall in love with you, and stay in love enough to be married and get sponsored and remain in marital bliss for at least those 2 required years of “Conditional Status.”
Your ability to be and stay in the US legally as LGBTQ person is completely cancelled out under the Defense Of Marriage Act of 1996.
And so even post-DOMA an LGBTQ person, who was in fact married, has to prove they did not marry for immigration purposes.
Because VAWA visas are not “capped,” or limited, according to a quota, and I technically am married I would still like to see if I’d qualify under this, (as well as the U-Visa for which I definitely qualify,) but the very reason it is hard for me to apply under the Violence Against Women Act is not because it is hard for me to prove that violence took place, but that the marriage was “bona fide,” and not solely for immigration purposes.
The marriage being “bona fide” is a major requirement to qualify, (and the VAWA application also has to be filed within 2 years of a possible divorce, so there is a considerable time limit and element of danger involved in this process.)
But most of the violence took place exactly because I was lesbian, and not even “just” because I was a woman, as he was actually trying to “straighten” me out, “make me heterosexual,” by holding immigration law and LGBTQ discrimination against me. It is very hard to report someone who has threatened to “out” me (as homosexual to immigration,) exactly as a way of “extortion,” when all along that constitutes marriage fraud, (a federal felony, under the Immigration Marriage Fraud Act of 1986.)
Yet being lesbian in an opposite-sex marriage does not make me a fraud, but a victim exactly, of anti-LGBTQ legislation and of the individuals who enforce it, (and I never lied to my husband about my sexual orientation nor my legal status neither so I did not deceive him in any way, nor did I strike a deal which is irreconcilable with my sexual orientation and gender identity as the conscious idea of this as only possibility would have killed me.)
In reality I have been in a 22 years opposite-sex, abusive relationship that has felt like psychological rape and murder, (10 years of it married, and without sponsorship nor divorce,) and my husband has managed to live off of me increasingly more to eventually completely this whole time, and he simply would not have been able to stay in Los Angeles himself to pursue his own creative ambitions if it had’t been for me.
He knew fully well I was lesbian from the start, (out since 1994, and he was around for it himself, and only increasingly “closeted” again at work through his involvement,) and he also definitely knew I wanted to be as far from him and his family and their religious fanaticism and their hometown as possible.
He knew that as an undocumented and gay person I could not marry to adjust my immigration status and had no legal recourse at all, (as this isn’t hard to figure out, and most people who don’t know a thing about the immigration process have figured this out more or less subconsciously,) but which he often, and consciously enough, threatened me with, (from female desperation to marriage fraud, detention, deportation, psychiatric hospitalization, etc.,) often using a combination of heterosexual, male and US citizen privilege in his argument.
And his family has been aware of his behavior throughout but have kept quiet and supported it in all their ignorance, even because profiting themselves, like with me paying his share of the rent at their music rehearsal studio. And a good amount of my family’s savings, given to me for lawyer fees and maintenance until my eventual legalization, got switched into his name when he bought a 1972 muscle car without my approval and without my name on the paperwork, and which I am still maintaining. I am also still paying for all his bills and he has basically moved back into my office, since January 2015, although not on my lease, and occasionally sleeping in the car.
He has controlled me through immigration law since 1995, by picking up where my first husband left off with the divorce and unfinished sponsorship, and finishing off the job, or rather if it hadn’t been for LGBTQ rights happening in the US.
Delusional and alcoholic he ultimately wanted for his artistic ambitions to pay off without putting in any real work, and was more than willing to sacrifice any women, for some male attention and sex, in the process for it, and his brothers thought exactly the same and encouraged it. When he didn’t follow their will enough they threw him out of the band and the studio, and this is the only reason he is back in my office and my life full-time again, playing his guitar while I keep paying our bills.
When I don’t follow his will enough, meaning supporting him entirely and exclusively, emotionally and financially, like I am both his housewife and biggest groupie or something, he starts controlling me through his moods, from sober and depressed and to belligerently drunk, getting away with it in my own office, until I actually file my paperwork and pay the accompanying lawyer fee in 2016.
Whenever I have asserted my sexual orientation and gender identity, and according needs and goals, throughout the years I have always been met with resistance from him, as well as from society at large, and previously with the government legally sanctioning LGBTQ and women’s discrimination, (and in many states still does.)
But post-DOMA, (especially federally in 2015, since US immigration is primarily internationally conducted and so is a federal issue,) the very fact that DOMA has been proven unconstitutional by the Supreme Court has given me considerable leverage in my argument to prove “mixed orientation marriage” during DOMA does not automatically translate into marriage fraud, and more likely is the result of force by the American party and severe compromise out of grounded fear of deportation by the foreign party.
The official police reports of my husband’s two arrest for domestic violence against me, in 2004 in LA and in 2006 in Chula Vista, are fortunately also easier to obtain now that the Secure Committees Act is down in California, due to Governor Jerry Brown, since 2015 and local police authorities now are required to assist immigration abuse victims rather than arresting them and allowing ICE to place holds on immigrants they would normally release.
But all the copies of paperwork given to me at the time of my husband’s arrests, (still only my “boyfriend” at the time and reported as such,) I still have in my possession, safely put away in a storage facility locker out of my husband’s legal reach, along with all my original documents still, (passports, visas, IDs and tax forms, marriage and divorce records, and enough proof in the form of mutual bills and correspondence, including pictures, videos, recordings, texts, and social media to establish the validity of our 22 year relationship.)
Whenever I reassert my identity and my will now, in my own office paid for by me, he leaves to sleep in my car in endless cycles of repetition. He holds on to my belongings, both my property and income, as his own, including when he leaves for his homeless drinking binges supposedly caused by my “fights,” for my own autonomy, and he will leave for days with my house keys on him, the spare set he holds onto as his own at least, despite not being on the lease with me, and he will even influence my neighbors to turn them into potential witnesses on his side.
(Of course joint leases are also a crucial important piece of paperwork to establish marriage validity but he does not want contractual responsibilities, since he has to no intention of upholding them, and I thus cannot afford to put him as cosigner on anything of mine, effectively erasing my own proof in the process but preferring that to him having us evicted and back on the streets again.) Restraining orders are hard to follow up on as well since there is a realistic fear of retaliation involved, including from his family, as they have retaliated for his two previous arrests as well.
I have had no chance at furthering my formal education since I do not have 3 years of high school in this country but instead graduated from high school in the Netherlands, which is not recognized for undocumented immigrants to be students, but I have acquired 25 years of experience on my own and the only thing that is standing in my way of my feature documentary becoming a reality, legally that is, is the work permit that would come with the VAWA petition, which I could realistically receive within just 1 year of applying and being approved.
While this would only be the first step in a total 14 year process to US citizenship, and not include a travel visa for the first 4 years, it would however be the single most important one as the right to pursue income means having a way to be free in ones life, and to pursue anything else after that.
My documentary would qualify as educational and so for non-profit purposes, and aside from the work permit that would make things like fiscal sponsorship possible for me, I paid for everything out of my own pocket, so own all film- and editing equipment, and a complete, feature narrative manuscript exists. Despite not having a work permit my film production company is allowed to hire American citizens, and will in 2017, for the film’s crowd funding campaign.
Since his 2004 arrest prompted our 4 year move to Chula Vista, in an effort of my husband to lay low from the LAPD, and he generally has done everything already to erase my whole identity and life, including our past together, and with it also proof of my existence and my moral character, so he can live like a carefree artist, who uses female groupies for money and sex and company, he certainly would not want any police investigation that would come with the VAWA petition. It would also expose how his family, (the true culprits behind his behavior, in their desperate need for fame,) have been using deportation threats against me for years in order to live on my family’s money, of which they have spent thousands.
The VAWA accompanied police investigation would in a sense reopen the case of his first arrest against me in 2004 and the false testimonies in his defense that resulted in the dropping of his charges. It could at last expose the true circumstances around the arrest, and which I have been writing about all along.
A truthful testimony, and so one in my defense, could have resulted in a U-Visa back then but was made impossible through my husband’s intimidation and that of his brothers.
The abuse, the arrest and the move, made a forced marriage possible, and one without sponsorship, and could have resulted in a VAWA self-petition in 2007 when it occurred in Chula Vista, if it wasn’t for me being unemployed, destitute and homeless below immigration checkpoint by then, and completely unable to hire a lawyer. Now both the U-Visa and VAWA are slated to be filed in 2016 and with it a police investigation might open with whatever consequences may come for either one of us.
In hindsight, at 43, and after 25 years here, I don’t think my move to Los Angeles came from an unhealthy need for fame and fortune but really just a basic need for happiness, which in my case, as a “woman” or female-bodied individual, as well as a member of the LGBTQ community, also necessarily meant the need for visibility, only precisely because history has rendered us invisible, and our lives as not our own unlivable.
When I initially moved to Los Angeles in 1992 as a naive, idealistic and romantic 19 year old aspiring filmmaker, no internet existed, and no digital video and if one wanted to be a filmmaker one went to Hollywood, as far as I understood, and that is what everybody I admired myself did, from James Dean to John Cassavetes and while certainly struggling they never became “illegal” though, to be persecuted by the government for it.
Male dominated government and society’s attempt at controlling women’s choices and erasing female history as valid, and my own husband as prime example within it and trying realistically to erase me still, makes me me all the more motivated to stay on in the US to self-petition for citizenship with an immigration lawyer, and moreover to make the film finally that I was meant to always make, to present the whole truth around my circumstances and my true identity and set the record straight on “becoming undocumented” in a “broken” immigration system.
And ultimately I have only acquired more identities and statuses, and beyond being an undocumented bi-racial gender nonconforming lesbian writer and filmmaker, can add activist, feminist, and abuse and rape survivor to the list; openly and without pride nor shame but in the name of justice needing to be served for the violation of my basic human rights.
I have always done everything to fight him off, both mentally and physically, but won’t leave him, since there is no relationship to leave, so leaving him would translate into leaving Los Angeles or the US, essentially requiring self-deportation. I’d naturally have to give up my film, all my film equipment, my muscle cars and my production office in Hollywood in order to leave him.
I however qualify for the Violence Against Women Act and the U-Visa and am working on legalization with an immigration lawyer right now. I can’t divorce prematurely or else I will lose those options to legalization.
So, in a strange twist of events, he has become my cameraman and soundtrack person instead, after having experienced, slowly but surely, a change of heart regarding women and LGBTQ people, and angering with this his wanna-be famous, Trump supporting family to the point where they have completely cut off contact with him.
And ultimately of course the very reason I don’t qualify for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is that I came here legally, and not illegally, and over the age of 16. (I made several trips over here when I was under 16 years of age as well but only legally on tourist visas, to vacation only, so I’m not a childhood arrival, since I came here at age 19 as a film student on a 5-year visa. And I paid up to $15.000 to do it right, which I’d saved up through working in the Netherlands myself, to cover the required full-time status at out-of-state tuition fees, and the English tests and full medical exams while still in the Netherlands, and the proof of finances for living expenses throughout one’s study, etc. And of course I also paid for my Adjustment-Of-Status the moment I married in 1992.)
And so I did everything legally, and therefore want only justice, not compassion or pity. I got married to the opposite-sex, a US citizen husband, completely against my will and after forced sexual contact I didn’t dare to report, only to become a longterm victim of opposite-sex, (heterosexual/hetero-normative) domestic violence, which was thus primarily gender nonconforming lesbian abuse, and I didn’t even marry the same-sex, which would have been in violation of DOMA, and so could never experience true love in the process neither, losing all my girlfriends along the way.
And why does one have to get married to a US citizen, (family law immigration sponsorship as only legal pathway), to attain US citizenship at all? Why isn’t the US a “land of opportunity,” while it falsely promotes itself to be exactly that?
A land of opportunity would come with the right to pursue income as individual immigrant, not as a spouse of an American, (as natural part of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.) I have naively thought that was the whole idea behind the US, individual rights, as opposed to Europe, where family relations have traditionally been everything instead.
But Europe in reality has an immigration system based on merit, a point system, which does not require a “who you know, by relation,” but “what can you do, as individual” mentality.
(The visa quotas and principles regarding a country’s acceptance of refugees is an altogether different matter than immigration, although often mixed up with it, and should instead be agreed on under international, human rights law, by the UN’s standards.)
Why not create a US immigration system not based on marriage at all? Just merit, (intellectual- and emotional intelligence-based or so, but on the principle of individual rights,) and just leave marriage to people who actually love each other instead.
End of Part 5.
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For a Summary of this Story, Click the Link Below:
The Queer Case for Individual Rights: From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (2015)
For Parts 1 Through 5 of this 5-Part Story, Click the Links Below:
From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 1 of 5) (2017)
From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 2 of 5) (2017)
From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 3 of 5) (2017)
From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 4 of 5)(2017)
From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 5 of 5) (2017)
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My name is Gabriella Bregman, I am a Hollywood-based Writer, Filmmaker and Producer, currently in production of a Feature Documentary about LGBTQ US-Immigration Exclusion-Policy, including my personal story of US immigration discrimination during DOMA, (Defense Of Marriage Act, of 1996–2015,) titled ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights,’ through my film production company Bregman Films.
The 2001 John Cassavetes Film Retrospective ‘Gena and John: A Cassavetes Retrospective’ at the Laemmle Theatres in Los Angeles is a Bregman Films Production.
I am also the Founder of a Nonprofit Film Organization Queer Female Filmmakers Los Angeles — A Media Site & LA Film Mixers (2018.)
In 2018 I am publishing my story and essays in a book, titled ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights & Other Essays.’
I identify as a Gender Nonconforming Lesbian, “non-op” Trans-Masculine, and Bi-Racial, from the Netherlands, Los Angeles-based.
My pronouns are: they/them/theirs.
Please check out my other articles on LGBTQ- and Immigration Issues, the State of Women and LGBTQ People in Film, and Lesbian/Queer Film as well as Queer Female Sexuality and Gender Identity at medium.com/@gabriellabregman
A few titles:
Resume/FILM BIO: Gabriella Bregman (2018) (2018)
2018 Update on Documentary ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights’ (2018)
A Note on the State of Women in Film (2016)
A Few Notes On LGBTQ Filmmaking (2017)
Some Thoughts on the State of Lesbian Filmmaking in the US (part 1 of 5) (2018)
John Cassavetes Film Retrospective (2001) (2018)
On ‘Moonlight’ and the Subject of Positive Representation (2017)
My 2018 Oscar Pick for Best Picture (2018)
In Defense of Rationality (2018)
In Defense of Individual Rights (2018)
A Few Notes on US Immigration Exclusion Policies Towards Women- and LGBTQ Immigrants (2014)
The Root Cause Of Misogyny, And The Necessity Of Free Will (Gender Binary System notes, part 1 of 7) (2016)
The Male And Female Brain, And The “Cause” Of Transgenderism(Gender Binary System notes, part 2 of 7) (2016)
The Gender-Binary System Was Created For Population Control And Slavery, Including Sex Slavery (Gender Binary System notes, part 7 of 7)
All Articles Written by Gabriella Bregman (TM). All Pictures Owned by Gabriella Bregman (TM). All Rights Reserved (2018)
