A lawyer for the DOMA project said this marks 'a profound change.' | M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO DOMA ruling stops deportation

The Supreme Court’s ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act had immediate ramifications for binational same-sex couples facing deportation proceedings.

At 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, New York immigration judge Barbara Nelson adjourned the deportation proceedings against a Colombian man married to a male U.S. citizen, meaning that his green card application would move forward, according to a lawyer for The DOMA Project, a group of married binational couples seeking green cards for their foreign spouses.


“The judge took into account that section 3 of DOMA had been struck down…and she adjourned the proceedings so that he could pursue the green card case,” Lavi Soloway of the DOMA project said.

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Before Wednesday’s decision, members of same-sex binational couples could not sponsor their foreign-born partners for green cards, a right afforded to heterosexual couples. As a result, even if binational couples were married in states that allowed same-sex marriage, the foreign born partner could still be deported.

Steven and Sean Brooks, the Colombian-American couple whom Soloway represents, had been together for 10 years and were married in New York in 2011. That year, Brooks filed a green card application on his husband’s behalf. However, the application was denied because the federal government did not recognize their marriage.

“As soon as the decision was posted today on the Supreme Court website, we printed the decision and our summer intern ran it from our law firm five blocks to the immigration court and delivered a copy to the judge,” Soloway said. The judge immediately adjourned the court.

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“The pages were literally still warm from the printer,” he added. “It gives new meaning to hot off the presses.”

The Supreme Court’s decision marks “a profound change in the status of lesbian and gay Americans in relation to the federal government,” Soloway said.