The Queer Case for Individual Rights: From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented

My name is Gabriella Bregman, I’m a Los Angeles-based filmmaker from the Netherlands, currently producing a feature documentary about LGBTQ immigration injustice. (I also wrote a piece of legislation I am trying to get lawyers attention with called “The DOMA Victims Act for Legal Entries.”)

“The Queer Case for Individual Rights” is an expose of the US’s “broken” immigration system, its’ unconstitutional exclusion policies and specific targeting of LGBTQ communities, (in a long history of policymaking designed to exploit the most vulnerable of minority groups, specifically women and of color,) and my own situation as “queer and undocumented,” and former film student within that.

I am one of approximately 267.000 LGBTQ-undocumented immigrants, amongst a total 11 million undocumented immigrants. (An estimated 40% of the 11 million are Legal Entries, something the media does not want to discuss when talking about illegal immigration, nor the fact that a small percentage of those were federally discriminated against by the Defense Of Marriage Act of 1996.)

In 1992, at age 19, I moved to the US legally on a 5-year student visa to study film in Los Angeles through enrollment in the film program at Los Angeles City College and with intent to transfer to a 4-year university on a visa extension, (aiming for UCLA,) but within my first school semester I was pressured into an immigration marriage by a fellow film student, canceling out my student visa status. (He also became a fairly well-known screenwriter, which doesn’t help my case one bit.)

After divorcing my husband I couldn’t legalize myself due to the Defense Of Marriage Act and the fact that I’m lesbian, which was the primary reason for the divorce in 1994.

I identify as a gender nonconforming lesbian. (I experience no body dysphoria and happen to not need any medical or legal transitioning procedures myself, yet do consider myself to be trans-masculine or gender nonconforming and this gender identity, on top of my sexual orientation, did further complicate social and immigration matters for me.)

I was subjected to domestic violence, (including 7 years of homelessness,) in two opposite-sex marriages I couldn’t defend myself against legally in the US because of this country’s stance against same-sex marriage, and its’ exclusion from immigration policy, prior to June 26 2015, (and in California in 2013,) when DOMA was struck down federally.

I have paid my taxes in the US for 23 years, working at the Laemmle Theatres, volunteering for Film Independent and producing a John Cassavetes film retrospective, but have been labeled “illegal” by the government and rendered deportable without due process, (not in deportation proceedings however.)

If I would have immigrated to the US post-DOMA I would have at least qualified for citizenship through same-sex marriage, (marriage practically being the only option in the almost non-existent pathway to US citizenship.)

I now qualify through the Violence Against Women Act and am working on legalization with an immigration lawyer but to have been undocumented for almost 20 years, “persecuted on paper,” has been unbearable in every way and is in fact retroactive punishment, also in the process destroying any chance at love with a woman before the Defense Of Marriage Act of 1996 was finally struck down in June of 2015.

In July of 2015 I came out as “queer and undocumented” socially and online to add my voice to the ongoing immigration conversation in rational defense of fair and comprehensive immigration reform; I believe the right to mobility is a universal, human right and not an American privilege.