NEWSBYTINA SHULL

Guest blogger Tina Shull is a History PhD student at UC Irvine in California, studying the rise of immigration detention in the U.S., and as well as an intern for the Detention Watch Network, an organization at the forefront of challenging and reforming the broken U.S. immigration detention system.

But You're Married?

I grew up in San Diego, California.  It was on the playground in elementary school twenty years ago when I first heard the slanderous insult.  "Illego!" one child taunted another.  Having no idea what this strange word meant I joined in anyway just for fun, adding what I thought I heard to my canon of fun insults, right next to dork and dickhead.  It was several years before I figured out that I was really hearing "illegal," in reference to unauthorized immigrants.  And I still had no idea that twenty years later I would marry one.

I went to UCLA as an undergrad, and then went on to get my Master's at NYU.  Now I am working towards a Ph.D. in U.S. History at UC Irvine.  I met my husband Andis while I was living in New York, and we were married nearly two years ago.  Two days after our beautiful wedding in Vermont, Immigration and Customs Enforcement took my husband into custody, detained him in New Jersey for three months, and deported him to Albania.  We still live apart, and he has a 10-year ban from the United States.

Nearly everyone I tell this to immediately replies with the question, "But you're married?"  If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me that question . . . Unfortunately, most Americans are not aware that marrying a U.S. citizen does not automatically get you "in."  This may have been the case in the past, but not anymore.