Word: widowed
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...Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has acknowledged complaints like Goukassian's. Earlier this month, Napolitano, facing a growing number of lawsuits stemming from the so-called widow penalty in U.S. immigration regulations, suspended the rule's enforcement. "Smart immigration policy balances strong enforcement practices with commonsense, practical solutions to complicated issues," she said. Critics have been harsher, suggesting that imposing the provision made authorities look petty if not heartless...
...some on Capitol Hill don't think a temporary measure goes far enough. On June 23, Florida Senator Bill Nelson and Massachusetts Representative Jim McGovern introduced legislation, the Fairness to Surviving Spouses Act, that would nix the widow penalty for good. To leverage their message, they were joined by both Goukassian and another military widow, Diana Engstrom, whose husband was killed in Iraq in 2004 in a rocket-propelled-grenade attack. Engstrom, a Kosovo native, found out afterward that she, too, would be deported because she'd been married for less than the two years required for an immigrant spouse...
...sure bet, but anti-immigration sentiment still runs hot enough in Congress to make passage of the Nelson-McGovern bill a real challenge; and it's likely a big reason the Obama Administration, which is cautiously trying to revive immigration reform, hasn't completely done away with the widow penalty on its own yet. Conservative immigration think tanks like the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, for example, say the rule is a sensible safeguard against rampant marriage fraud, sham matrimonies between a U.S. citizen and a foreigner solely to get the latter a green card or legal residence...
...Brent Renison, an Oregon immigration attorney who has headed up numerous suits challenging the widow penalty, calls the marriage-fraud argument bogus. "We've never asked for automatic approval of these widows' legal residence status," he says. "We simply ask that they be allowed to show that their marriages were valid, and if so, recognize that the humane thing to do is let them stay where they've made a new life." That's especially true, Renison insists, when the surviving spouse has a U.S.-born child from the marriage. In one of the more controversial cases, a Brazilian woman...
...There are almost 300 known widow-penalty cases in the U.S. today, though lawyers like Renison believe there are hundreds if not thousands of other widows and widowers in similar situations who haven't yet approached immigration authorities. Of the documented cases, about a quarter are estimated to involve children. If the numbers don't seem overwhelming, Renison argues that's precisely the point: the dogged pursuit of such cases gives immigration enforcement the kind of spiteful, Javert-like image that it certainly doesn't need. Immigration officials counter that they're simply enforcing the law. But "consider...