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Nevilledog

(55,082 posts) Tue Jun 25, 2024, 11:38 AM Jun 2024

Elie Mystal: The Supreme Court Just Took Its First Swipe at Marriage Equality

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/munoz-supreme-court-marriage-immigration/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/fySup

Every year, there is at least one Supreme Court case that I wasn’t paying attention to, or didn’t think was that important, that absolutely floors me for its cruelty and misapplication of American law. This year, that case is Department of State v. Muñoz, an immigration case that the justices ruled on last week. While I had fully expected the court to use the case to continue its longstanding tradition of racist rulings against brown immigrants, I had not anticipated that it would also turn out to be a frontal attack by Republican justices on the right to marry, aimed squarely at gay and lesbian couples. Muñoz will be a case the conservatives cite in future opinions limiting same-sex marriages whenever they get around to taking away the rights recognized in Obergefell v. Hodges.

The case involves an American citizen, Sandra Muñoz, who has been trying to get a permanent residency card (more commonly known as a green card) for her husband, Luis Asencio-Cordero. Many people know that a noncitizen can obtain legal status in this country if they marry an American citizen (see Trump, Melania), but many white people don’t know that the process is not automatic. The government reserves the right to deny entry to spouses, and nonwhite people face that reality all the time.

Asencio-Cordero came to this country without documentation in 2008. In 2010, he married Muñoz. They were married for five years and had a child together, and decided to make his status “legal” by applying for a green card. Due to our Byzantine immigration laws, this required Asencio-Cordero to get a waiver from the Department of Homeland Security absolving him of his past undocumented entry (which he obtained), and then go back to his country of origin (El Salvador) and apply for a visa at the consulate there (which he did).

But in El Salvador, the U.S. Consulate (a division of the Department of State) denied his application. The consulate didn’t even give him a reason for why he was denied, he was just denied. Muñoz and Asencio-Cordero guessed that the reason might be that the consular suspected he was a member of the transnational MS-13 gang, based on some of his tattoos. It is critical to note that Asencio-Cordero had no criminal record, either in the US or El Salvador, and had literally never been arrested. But he did have tattoos.

*snip*