The DOMA Victims Act for Legal Entries
‘The DOMA Victims Act for Legal Entries’ is the name of a piece of legislation I came up with and am designing in an attempt to protect those amongst the 11 million undocumented immigrants who entered the country legally, (that is with immigration inspection and real and valid documentation,) and who fell victim to the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996.
This includes anyone who initially entered the country legally, identifies as part of the LGBTQ community, and who was prevented by the US immigration discrimination bill called DOMA to remain in the country legally through marriage to a same-sex US citizen or same-sex US permanent resident.
(Some people seem to be under the strange impression that LGBTQ people who fell victim to DOMA are “newcomers” in the US, and specifically compared to DREAM-Act, DACA and DAPA-eligible people.
One does not have to be new in the country to have been discriminated by DOMA of course. In fact many American citizens, born and raised here long before DOMA went into effect in 1996, were affected by DOMA exactly, including the very person who was instrumental in striking it down, US Citizen Edith Windsor.)*
(It is a bit of a semi-imaginary piece of legislation at this point because I really don’t know how far I can realistically go with this but I know I am definitely on to something with this.)
I received an email this morning which only confirms the importance of me having to do this, and thereby inevitable dividing the 11 million into subgroups. The email (from one of the many immigration advocacy organizations I am a member of or subscribed to) read something to the extent of not letting Donald Trump divide us by proclaiming that he would “work something out” for DACA recipients only, leaving the rest vulnerable to deportation.
While Donald Trump is an overall despicable excuse for a human being he is not actually responsible for dividing the 11 million. President Obama actually officially divided the 11 million by his 2014 Executive Action announcement of DACA/DAPA recipients being eligible for temporary work permits.
And the undocumented community and immigration advocates themselves are responsible for dividing us all by having designed this limited piece of legislation to begin with. (They should at least have drafted legislation around unfair trade agreements like NAFTA as well.)
The DACA/DAPA legislation, and its’ precursor, the DREAM-ACT, (and of which it is essentially an expansion,) created the original division of the 11 million, splitting the group in almost two equal halves, and necessarily implying that those who were eligible for DACA/DAPA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Deferred Action for Parent Arrivals) were the “good immigrants” somehow, and the rest of us the “bad immigrants,” thereby favoring those who entered illegally over those who entered legally.
In reality those who entered the US legally should be considered for legalization over those who entered illegally but they in fact bypassed some 6.5 million people with this limited piece of legislation.
The DACA/DAPA community has been very vocal about their plight and have frequently quoted the 11 million number as to imply we are all one group standing in solidarity with each other but they have done virtually nothing to highlight the plight of those of us who entered the US legally and on real and valid documentation, who stood in line, paid the processing fees, passed the medical and language tests, got Social Security numbers and work permits and paid our taxes.
They have done nothing to highlight the plight of those of us who entered the US legally and are also part of the LGBTQ community, and who are in fact the only ones amongst the total 11 million who had explicit federal discrimination like the Defense of Marriage Act working against our permanent legalization.
They have only mentioned the LGBTQ community in relation to LGBTQ refugees, (who admittedly would have an extremely hard time going through the legal asylum process,) but never mention the LGBTQ immigrants who are not refugees but who legally entered the US on student and work visas and were forced out of the country due to DOMA specifically.
It took us, the LGBTQ community, 11 years to defeat DOMA and now those amongst us who had the courage to overstay our visas as a form of civil obedience in the face of real federal discrimination are still left hanging, facing potential deportation under Trump.
No, we can’t “just get married, now that DOMA’s down,” a well-meaning but insensitive line I have heard thrown my way numerous times now whenever I try to explain my immigration situation to anyone in the US. One still has to answer to US immigration as to why one has overstayed one’s visa, and they don’t just applaud your civil disobedience in the face of real federal discrimination and hand you a green card as a reward.
US immigration still can and will easily enforce retroactive punishment instead and deport you for overstaying and having become undocumented. They can do this by holding the 1996 IRRIRA Act against you, enforcing a 3 or 10 year ban from the US, or by using the 1986 Immigration Marriage Fraud Act against you, implying your same-sex marriage is not real but fraudulent and for immigration purposes only.
Not only have same-sex marriage couples often not been able to live their lives as openly as opposite-sex couples, resulting in a lack of official documents for the immigration interview, such as joint bank accounts, joint house leases, wedding pictures or other pictures with family present, lack of children in many cases, the fear to be openly “out” at one’s job, since one still could get fired for being openly gay on the job in many states, and even, such as in my case as well, a gender non-binary appearance, which confuses immigration officials.
It is for these specific reasons I have started to design The DOMA Victims Act for Legal Entries. Now I am not a lawyer but neither were a lot of the undocumented people who helped design the DREAM-Act, (the history around this bill can be traced back to the deportation case of Legal Entry John Lennon in 1972, and which he won several years after he was forced into deportation proceedings by the Nixon administration along with his wife, Legal Entry Yoko Ono. The DREAM-Act ironically applies to Illegal Entries instead.)
The irony lies exactly in the fact that the bill applying to John Lennon, (with Yoko Ono getting inadvertently swept up in the injustice against John Lennon by US immigration, as her case was actually different from his since she was previously married to a US citizen and had a US citizen daughter with him,) was built around the principle that he entered the US legally and did not in fact overstay, as the US claimed, but was forced to prematurely leave while being here legally, and so that he was in other words innocent of illegal immigration, (besides being someone with extraordinary ability, which essentially sealed his case.)
The difference between Legal Entry and Illegal Entry is enormously important and completely swept under the rug by both the undocumented community itself and their adversaries, US immigration and the US media in general.
When one enters the US with proper US Customs inspection of one’s real and valid documents, acquired by the potential immigrant at the US Embassy in one’s own country prior to immigrating, one is essentially innocent of Illegal Immigration, ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ as the principle of justice goes.
When one enters the US without proper inspection and/or without real and valid documentation one is automatically guilty of a Civil Infraction, (which is not a Criminal Offense though,) and in essence not innocent of Illegal Immigration.
The word Illegal, (and the application of it to people who entered illegally, by referring to them as “illegals,”) has become bastardized by the media in an attempt to further smear people who essentially came here as refugees, but who did not bother with or did not get past the asylum seeking application process.
It is not illegal to be a refugee by the way but one still has to apply for asylum with US immigration, and at the risk of getting denied due to very limited visas or getting unfairly detained by US Customs for being a victim of violence in one’s own country.
These are actually the very reasons certain people avoid the asylum seeking process, and ultimately understandably so, if one’s life is truly in danger. (Why some of these refugees did not try to apply for legal asylum in other countries who do not enforce such strict and highly unfair rules, like maybe those countries that make up Western Europe for instance, I cannot answer for certain though.)
The proper words to apply to those amongst the 11 million who entered illegally are not Illegals, as no human being can be illegal but only their actions can be, nor Undocumented Immigrants for that matter, but simply Illegal Entries. This would be proper and politically correct, so as to distinguish those of us amongst the 11 million who entered legally, (students, guest workers, entrepreneurs, and even tourists, etc.) who should technically be referred to as Legal Entries, (and not the negative emphasizing term Overstayers.)
Expired Legal Entries would be a decent sounding term to me, as not to confuse us with Legal Immigrants neither of course. I personally refer to myself as a DOMA victim, (while in reality I am also a victim of domestic violence at the hands of a US Citizen spouse, an opposite sex one however, a US husband while I identify as lesbian. I am currently eligible for permanent legalization through the Violence Against Women Act as well as the U-Visa, having entered the US legally in 1992 from the Netherlands, by myself and at my own free will, on a international student visa to study film in Los Angeles at age 19.)
I am discussing this issue with lawyers at the moment but if anyone feels spoken to by this piece, that is, if anyone qualifies as a Legal Entry who was technically forced out of the country due to DOMA and overstayed instead, please do not hesitate to contact me. (Private Message me on Facebook if you like, I will not disclose your information to anyone.)
Lastly, let me hereby also make the clearcut distinction between an immigrant and a refugee, since the media nor the undocumented community does anything in that regard and continuously refers to all undocumented people as immigrants.
Those who entered the US illegally (or legally applied for asylum) did so out of pure desperation, did so in order to flee violence and poverty in their own countries to begin with, and oftentimes the violence and poverty was created or at least co-created by US foreign policy, including bad trade agreements like NAFTA of 1994 in Mexico.
A refugee is a person who flees a country out of desperation and relies on amnesty to be brought to safety, amnesty itself being a form of compassion for people who are unable, due to circumstances, to live a dignified and safe life.
An immigrant is a person who leaves their own country often out of a sense of ambition, and often possessing a set of skills, whether low or high, which can benefit the country of their intended move. They rely on guest work programs and international student programs for legal acceptance, which are not a form of amnesty, and often are not a sure pathway to citizenship at all but only a step towards that.
Then there are immigrants who are simply family members of US citizens and want to permanently unite with them, and they get sponsored by those family members through the “easiest,” or least difficult of way to immigrate, family law immigration, almost the only realistic pathway to citizenship, often in the form of marriage to a US citizen or US permanent resident.
Many immigrants who initially entered on temporary work or student visas are forced to rely on marriage as the only way to become permanent legal residents and US citizens themselves, if they want to stay in the US, since employers realistically never sponsor them for legalization due to high costs and complicated legal processes that are not worth it for the employer, and schools do not have the legal authority to sponsor at all.
The very idea that the US is a country of immigrants itself is deeply flawed as a good part of the various immigrant waves were caused by desperation, not ambition, like the Irish potato famine, which caused the first large immigrant wave to this country.
Besides this, neither colonialists nor slaves can be properly defined as immigrants, a colonialist obviously having the intent of conquering, not respectfully integrating into a new country, and an enslaved person having been forced to move to a new country against their will at all.
Please do check out my other articles on US immigration if you find this subject interesting at all. And please do keep in mind that I am not a lawyer or legal authority on the matter, only someone who necessarily got interested in the subject of US immigration myself due to the fact that I fell victim to its’ faulty system.
I am a Los Angeles-based writer, filmmaker and producer, currently in post-production of a documentary detailing my own immigration journey and legal case, titled ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights: From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented.’
*LGBTQ people have always immigrated to this country, some of them of course coming in through Ellis Island. There is a long history of US immigration denying people entry to the US based on what they called “sexual deviancy.” (An unmarried woman by the way also fairly easily ended up in this category.)
At the time of Ellis Island immigration “sexual deviants” (or those suspected of it anyway,) were lumped together with “vagrants,” “scoundrels” and “imbeciles,” in other vague psychiatric terminology of the time, to determine who was criminally inclined, and so to be sent back or to be used as free/cheap labor.
Psychiatry and a superficial form of criminology often go hand in hand to determine not who is actually violent/ill-willed but who will not adjust to the hetero-normative way of procreation, since controlling procreation is how one controls population, for the use of cheap labor and to establish class differences exactly.
LGBTQ people weren’t actually officially banned from the US until 1952, under the INA 52 Act, which wasn’t lifted until 1990, (yes you read that right, 1990.)
(The AIDS virus was also blamed on Fidel Castro during the Mariel Boat Lift during the 1980s by the way.)
(If you are interested in LGBTQ immigration-exclusion policies you can read my article on that here.)
In order to slow down any LGBTQ rights progress made in the US the US government established the Defense Of Marriage Act in 1996, to make same-sex marriage officially federally illegal. (It was already illegal before 1996 but some same-sex marriage licenses had been given out by county clerks before.)
As far as people arguing that the DREAM-Act, DACA and DAPA eligible crowd have a right to be here, because they have been here all their lives, or for the most part of their lives, is simply playing on people’s emotions. (And I honestly do not wish for them to be deported at all, even if unfortunately they don’t care about the fate of the Legal Entries at all.)
First of all, it is a morally flawed argument. If a person stole your car years ago and then drove it all their lives, it doesn’t automatically become theirs, legally or morally speaking. Not that stealing a car is the same thing as crossing the border without inspection but if something is not done by the rules it doesn’t automatically make it right, just because it happened years ago, is my point. And not that the rules of immigration are fair to begin with neither, they are extremely unfair. But something not done by the rules years ago, doesn’t make it right later on, just because it happened a long time ago. One has to tackle the unconstitutionality of the immigration rules exactly in order to have a valid argument at all.)
And second of all, it is simply not true that they have been here for all, or for most, of their lives. DAPA stands for Deferred Action for Parent Arrivals, so if you arrived in the US as a parent you have not been here all your life.
DACA, (which is essentially a more comprehensive DREAM-Act,) stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, simply applies to the children who were brought here by those parents, (and so the parents are to be held accountable,) and the qualification age limit to be a Childhood Arrival is 16 or under, which means they could have spent up to 15 years in another country before.
As far as my own case, I arrived in the US legally on a student visa at age 19 and am 43 at the time of writing this, so I have actually technically been here for most of my life, 24 years total, (going on 25 in 2017.)
And I obviously do not qualify for DACA because I came here at 19, not 16 or under, and because I came here legally exactly. My student visa expired during DOMA, in 1997, and after I had already been the victim of abuse at the hands of an opposite-sex US citizen, a guy in film school who forced me to marry him just two months into my first school semester, and so personally in perfectly legal standing at the time.)
(There are currently also a certain amount of DREAM-Acters/DACA-eligible people who are finding a loophole around being Illegal Entries by taking advantage of certain travel privileges they have acquired, called Advance Parole, and are re-entering the country as a Legal Entry instead, becoming a newcomer all of a sudden, and hoping to marry a US Citizen before their Legal Entry visa expires, which just proves my point of the importance of Legal Entry versus Illegal entry, and also how marriage to a US citizen or US Permanent Resident is indeed to only realistic way to become a US citizen.)
Again, I am not the one dividing us 11 million into two separate groups, DACA/DAPA legislation is responsible for that, and no one wants to discuss this matter at all but only use the 11 million number when it is convenient for them.
I have previously worked in some capacity with some of these people in order to defend the idea of fair and comprehensive immigration reform for all 11 million and have given my time, money and energy to this goal, yet I cannot get a single response from these people.
(PS: I always include pictures of my Dutch passport with the student visa in it and my school letters of admission into the film department because people simply can not or do not want to believe I moved to the US by myself and voluntarily to be a filmmaker, in 1992 at age 19.
They insist that I must be an Illegal Entry instead, brought here by my parents or someone else, and must therefore be a DREAM-Acter of 2012. A DREAM-Acter is simply a child refugee who then grew up in the US and needs to go to school. I did not go to film school in 2012 but from 1992 through 1994, am not a DREAM-Acter, but was an international student majoring in Film, and my parents have always remained in the Netherlands with no intentions of moving to the US at all.
People also assume I must have entered the US first and then applied to get into film school, which is absolutely impossible. One gets a student visa from the American Embassy in one’s country of residence, that is after applying to colleges in the US from abroad, fulfilling all the requirements abroad, English tests, medical tests, international health insurance, college fees paid up front and proof of finances to get by on during college, etc.
I did everything by the rules and paid some $15.000 up front to acquire the student visa legally. I also paid for my adjustment-of-status when married to my first husband in 1992, to acquire my work permit.
If you look at the dates on my school letters of admission and the date of my arrival you will see I got accepted into a college before I arrived here. The school letters are dated April 1 1992, and my arrival date at LAX airport in Los Angeles is July 14 1992, so at least 3 months later.
They also simply insist that must have overstayed in 1997 and do not believe I was married before, and engaged to be married again at the time of my overstay. The simply cannot believe I was married from 1992 through 1994. They cannot believe I was intimidated into getting married while being a lesbian, and that I had a hard time proving any of this is even true, especially since he became accomplished in the film industry himself.
But then again, people usually do not believe or guess me to be in my mid-40s, so that probably has a lot to do with it. The average person still guesses me to be early 30s tops. I don’t think I look particularly young for my age but believe people in the US probably age prematurely because of bad dietary habits. I do not wish to body shame and accept everyone for who they are but the US simply promotes terrible health habits. (And basically, at 5'3 and a 100 lbs, and dressed masculine, I look like an eternal kid, at least from a distance and to the cops, who have harassed me plenty for it in what is really gender/identity profiling, aside from the racial profiling I’m also subjected to.)
People in general also assume I am necessarily Mexican, or at least Latin, and came here out of poverty, and do not consider people move here voluntarily from Europe and many other parts of the world all the time. I was born and raised in the Netherlands, and have a Dutch-Indonesian mother and a Dutch father. Most immigrants do not move here out of poverty, including Latin ones. Refugees move out of necessity, immigrants mostly move out of ambition, and so usually with money. It simply costs a lot to move to the US to begin with.
And lastly, people have a hard time guessing my gender, I am female, as in I was born female bodied, and will always be female, by choice, but do identify as gender non-conforming and trans-masculine.
All these misconceptions, and moreover the media’s negative picture of immigrants, make it incredibly hard for me to prove my 24 years of hardship in the US due to a faulty and discriminatory immigration system.)
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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)
