Court upholds deportation order for couple trying to have a
More proof as to why the 14th Amendment loophole for anchor babies needs to be closed NOW!!!
Court upholds deportation order for couple trying to have a child
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
"A federal appeals court upheld a deportation order Monday against a South San Francisco couple who had hoped to gain legal status by having a child, but were forbidden by their Roman Catholic faith to use artificial means of conception.
Peter Fernandez and Martha Katigbak, who emigrated from the Philippines more than 15 years ago, argued that being deported would violate their religious freedom.
The married couple said they were being denied equal treatment under a law that allows illegal residents to seek legalization if their deportation would cause exceptional hardship to a child or other close relative who is a U.S. citizen. The couple said they had been trying to have a child for many years, without success, and were prohibited by their religious beliefs from using in vitro fertilization.
But the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Fernandez and Katigbak had failed to show that their legal situation was related to their religion.
The court noted that the couple could have adopted a child and said that their explanation for not adopting - that their immigration status made their lives uncertain - was "not traceable to their religious beliefs."
Even if they had a child, the court said, they would qualify for protection from deportation only in rare cases of exceptional hardship, such as the child's serious health problems or special needs in school. That undermines their argument that the immigration law, with its exception for the hardship of a child, is pressuring them to violate their beliefs, the court said.
"No sensible person would abandon his religious precepts to have a child in the hope that the child would be so very ill or learning-disabled" that the parents would be safe from deportation, the three-judge panel said.
Martin Robles, the couple's lawyer, said he would ask the full appeals court for a rehearing. He said Fernandez and Katigbak, who overstayed their visas after entering the United States, were educated, religious, law-abiding people, "the kind that Americans want to stay here."
"The only possible means for them to qualify for this relief (from deportation) was through a means expressly prohibited by the Catholic Church," Robles said."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... OUAQH2.DTL
