Word: goukassian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...enough that Natalia Goukassian, then 21, had to spend her honeymoon in June 2006 in West Palm Beach, Fla., helping her husband Tigran find alternative treatments for connective tissue sarcoma, an aggressive cancer, or that six months later, the Air Force-enlisted man, 21, succumbed to the disease. But as it turned out, her painful ordeal had only just begun. While the Veteran Affairs Department deemed the Russian immigrant (not yet a legal resident) eligible for surviving-spouse benefits, immigration officials at Homeland Security took a very different view: at Natalia's interview for legal residence the next year...
...Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has acknowledged complaints like Goukassian's. Earlier this month, Napolitano, facing a growing number of lawsuits stemming from the so-called widow penalty in U.S. immigration regulations, suspended the rule's enforcement. "Smart immigration policy balances strong enforcement practices with commonsense, practical solutions to complicated issues," she said. Critics have been harsher, suggesting that imposing the provision made authorities look petty if not heartless...
...Capitol Hill don't think a temporary measure goes far enough. On June 23, Florida Senator Bill Nelson and Massachusetts Representative Jim McGovern introduced legislation, the Fairness to Surviving Spouses Act, that would nix the widow penalty for good. To leverage their message, they were joined by both Goukassian and another military widow, Diana Engstrom, whose husband was killed in Iraq in 2004 in a rocket-propelled-grenade attack. Engstrom, a Kosovo native, found out afterward that she, too, would be deported because she'd been married for less than the two years required for an immigrant spouse's legal...
...Goukassian, who says she has thus far been able to get her deportation deferred, is not yet part of a suit herself. She says she feels confident that Congress will decide the widows "have the truth on our side." Still, she fears there is a culture inside the U.S. immigration bureaucracy that assumes foreign spouses are merely green-card gold diggers. (To be fair, immigration agents do confront myriad scam artists, male and female.) She and Tigran were genuinely in love, she says, because they were "Russian soul mates" - he was born in Russia and came to America...
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