Gay Marriage Meets Immigration

[Geee]

American Spectator:

A week ago, immigration judge Mimi Tsankov, basing her ruling on the Obama Administration's rapidly changing immigration policy, postponed deportation hearings for Sujey Pando, a Mexican citizen whose story is as sympathetic as the judge's ruling is problematic: Ms. Pando appears likely to have deportation proceedings against her dropped because she is married to another woman.

Ms. Pando was pulled over in 2008 for a minor traffic violation at which time the police officer determined her to be in the country illegally and handed her over to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) which jailed her for 3½ months before beginning deportation proceedings.
In 2010, Ms. Pando went to Iowa and, under Iowa's State Supreme Court ruling which permitted gay marriage (a ruling that precipitated the removal of three of those justices in the state's 2010 retention elections), married her girlfriend, Violeta, an American citizen who now also uses the last name Pando.

It's hard not to have sympathy for Sujey Pando. According to her attorney, Lavi Soloway, who responded to e-mail queries for this article, she was physically and sexually abused as a child in Mexico. When she was 16 years old, her mother brought her to the U.S., but then kicked her out of their home a year later upon finding out that Sujey is a lesbian. Following that, her mother, who is a permanent resident, successfully got three of her children through the U.S. citizenship process, but excluded Sujey who is now the only non-citizen of her immediate family. She has a job, has (other than not using a turn signal) stayed on the right side of the law, and seems, based on quotes in the Denver Post article about her case, to speak English quite well. In other words, she's a poster girl for the assimilated, employed immigrant -- which is certainly one of the key reasons that attorney Soloway, a gay immigrant himself, took this case.