Advocacy Efforts
In May 2006, in conjunction with the Human Rights Watch, Immigration Equality released their report - "Family, Unvalued: Discrimination, Denial, and the Fate of Binational Same-Sex Couples under United States Law," which was based on research conducted from 2003-2006 to "emphasize and spotlight the plight of same-sex binational couples". The report documented the cases of couples who hid the fact they were in a same-sex relationship when reporting to the 2000 U.S. Census because they feared anti-LGBT bias in the immigration process, as well as cases of couples who failed to participate in the census because their foreign partners were living in the United States illegally. The report also cited couples who were affected by U.S. immigration policies that overlook same-sex bi-national couples completely and outlined facts about the U.S.'s current visa and immigration system explaining how LGBT people either fit into the system or do not.
The group campaigned to lift the ban on travel and immigration into the U.S. on the part of those with HIV, which had been enacted in 1987 and strengthened in 1993. In July 2008, President George Bush signed legislation to permit the lifting of the ban. President Obama announced in October 2009 that the Department Health and Human Services was publishing rules that would end the 22-year ban by removing HIV from list of "communicable disease of public health significance" that the Immigration Service relied on. The ban was lifted in January 2010.
In 2008 The group won over fifty political asylum cases where the potential deportees feared persecution if returned to their homeland.
In 2008, in conjunction with the Transgender Law Center, Immigration Equality drafted Immigration Law and the Transgender Client, a manual published by the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the first LGBT publication that the latter organization has issued.
Immigration Equality maintains a list of LGBT/HIV-friendly private immigration attorneys to provide legal representation for those who contact them. They also provide technical assistance to attorneys who are working on sexual orientation, transgender identity, or HIV status-based right of asylum applications, or other immigration applications where the client’s LGBT or HIV-positive identity is at issue in the case.
Read more about this topic: Immigration Equality (organization)
Famous quotes containing the word efforts:
“Whatever I may be, I want to be elsewhere than on paper. My art and my industry have been employed in making myself good for something; my studies, in teaching me to do, not to write. I have put all my efforts into forming my life. That is my trade and my work.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)