The world changed on June 26, 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor, 570 U.S. 12 (2013). Within immigration law, Section 3 of DOMA had been the single legal barrier to recognition of lawful same-sex marriages for federal immigration purposes.
As a result, post-Windsor, LGBT families have a panoply of newly available benefits and rights that flow from legal recognition of our families. Within immigration law, marriage validity was traditionally controlled by a place of celebration rule. If the marriage was legal where celebrated, it was proper for immigration purposes. DOMA preemptively carved out an exception to this rule by excluding legal same-sex marriages just as various national and state jurisdictions began to allow them. The impact of DOMA, combined with the now-repealed regulation that had deemed HIV/AIDS a “disease of public health significance,” rendering HIV-positive people inadmissible, complicated immigration issues for LGBT immigrants.
