U.S. citizen born in refugee camp sues over La. law blocking his marriage
Two weeks before their wedding, Viet “Victor” Anh Vo and his fiancée were stunned when a court clerk rejected their application for a marriage license because he couldn’t produce a birth certificate.
The couple had spent thousands of dollars on a wedding planner, caterer, florist, disc jockey and a reception hall for 350 guests before they learned that a newly amended Louisiana law would block them from getting married. They went ahead with February’s ceremony without a license to make it official, but they aren’t giving up on legally tying the knot.
Vo, a 31-year-old U.S. citizen who was born in an Indonesian refugee camp, sued Tuesday in federal court to challenge a law that has prevented other immigrants from getting married for the same reason he couldn’t.
“I don’t understand the law. I just want them to fix it, to make things right,” Vo said in an interview in his Lafayette hometown.
It’s not clear whether the lawsuit could have implications outside of the state. Neither the law’s critics nor officials with the National Conference of State Legislatures are aware of such legislation elsewhere, although NCSL spokesman Mick Bullock said the organization doesn’t closely track marriage license requirements.
The Republican legislator who sponsored January’s changes in the state’s marriage laws said it was designed to crack down on people using sham marriages to gain visas and citizenship.
Vo has lived in Louisiana since he was an infant and became a U.S. citizen when he was 8 years old, but he doesn’t have any official record of his 1985 birth in a refugee camp after his parents fled Vietnam.
That wouldn’t have been an insurmountable hurdle for Vo if he and his U.S.-born fiancée, Heather Pham, had applied for a marriage license before the law’s changes took effect on Jan. 1. Before then, they could have petitioned a judge to waive the birth certificate requirement.
But the amended law eliminated the waiver option for foreign-born applicants.