Obama’s Immigration Plan Includes Same-Sex Couples

Key senators are working out the kinks on a bipartisan immigration plan, but President Obama is crafting a proposal all his own, which is said to include reforms for same-sex couples.

Obama will unveil his plan in Las Vegas on Tuesday, but BuzzFeed talked with multiple sources familiar with the plan to get an idea of what it might include. “Same-sex couples will be part of his proposal,” said one Democratic source. A second was quick to note that same-sex couples, in which one is American and the other an illegal immigrant, are not included in the Senate’s bipartisan proposal.

Obama’s proposal does indeed answer a concern of many in the LGBT crowd, namely that heterosexual bi-national couples can move an illegal partner on the path to citizenship through marriage, while same-sex couples many times do not have that option. It’s not always simple, but it is possible to confer citizenship through marriage for heterosexual couples. Same-sex couples say that the option simply doesn’t exist for them.

Democratic Senators working on the bipartisan immigration reform package said that LGBT rights were not included, while Republican Marco Rubio’s press secretary Alex Conant added that: “The issue of same-sex couples and immigration are details that still need to be worked out in Senate.”

The LA Times reports that the Senate’s bipartisan immigration reform package is ambitious, but has already faced opposition on both sides. It remains to be seen what the response to President Obama’s proposal will be, but his frameworks are sometimes regarded as too dramatic or impractical, and are rejected by both parties.

Which immigration reform proposal do you think Americans will respond to more positively? Obama’s, or that of the bipartisan group of senators?