Foreign widows of U.S. citizens face deportations

PORTLAND – It couldn’t get any worse, Carla Arabella Freeman thought the day she went to the morgue to pick up her husband’s dismembered corpse two years ago.

But this May, the 27-year-old widow from South Africa was handcuffed and shackled on the orders of a Portland U.S. immigration judge, who concluded the law allowed him no choice but to deport her.

“They took me down a corridor. They took all my jewelry. They cuffed my ankles and put me in a little holding cell,” said Freeman, a petite redhead with big blue eyes.

According to immigration law, a foreign national who is married to a U.S. citizen for less than two years automatically loses their right to permanent residence upon their spouse’s death.

Freeman and her husband, Robert, were married for 11 months before his car was crushed by an oncoming Pepsi truck.

Nationwide, at least 25 others – mostly widows – are ensnared in what legal authorities call an unintended and embarrassing flaw in American immigration law.

“This is not what this country is about,” said Freeman’s attorney, Brent Renison, who won her conditional release after seven hours in a Portland holding cell and is now waging a battle to take Freeman’s case to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, a process expected to take months.

In Mount Vernon, Wash., Rubi Dobrenz faces deportation to her native Peru because her husband committed suicide shortly after their marriage in early 2000.

In Georgia, immigration officials are attempting to deport Olga Bota, a 38-year-old Romanian folk dancer, whose husband died in 2000 of stomach cancer, 16 months after their marriage. The couple’s daughter, a U.S. citizen now 4 years old, has already been sent to live with her grandparents in Romania’s Transylvanian province as Bota awaits her final deportation notice.

“I feel like I am being run out of this country,” Bota said in an e-mail written in her native Romanian.

In Orlando, Fla., Brazilian Maria Raquel Pascoal’s petition for a green card was denied, three months after her 30-year-old husband died in his sleep last September. His death came 20 months after their wedding and three months after the birth of their child.

“Brazil is a difficult country,” said Pascoal, 26. “With a baby, it’s very hard.”

For five decades, immigration in the United States has been regulated by the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, which set forth the procedure by which an American citizen and their foreign-born spouse can petition for permanent residency by filing the paperwork together.

But the law left open a gaping legal hole, failing to make provisions in the case of the sudden death of a spouse.

“There’s a serious fairness problem with the law as it is, because there’s just no recourse for these people. People who have fallen in love, gotten married — then death unexpectedly hits,” said Marshall Fitz, an associate director at the American Immigration Lawyers Association in Washington, D.C.

That’s exactly what happened in 1970, the year a Filipino woman found herself in limbo after her American husband died of a heart attack. She was deported to the Philippines, the first such deportation on record. Experts assume numerous others fell quietly into this immigration black hole for the next two decades until 1990.

That’s when Congress passed a rule allowing the widows and widowers of U.S. citizens to petition for a green card on their own, provided they had been married for at least two years before their spouse’s death.

But that leaves everyone that was married for less than that stranded, said attorney Mark Katsman, who represents Lyudmila Hinman, 52, of Kirov, Russia, who lived in Pompano Beach, Fla., with her American husband for 1 1/2 years, until he died of a heart attack. Her request for a green card was denied and she is now awaiting word on her appeal.

Concerns about marriage fraud prompted Congress to enact the two-year rule, said Paul Virtue, former general counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

One of the unacceptable side effects of the law as it is, is that it can result in removal of children of U.S. citizens who themselves are citizens.