Dorman, Now and Then
Attorney General Eric Holder’s unusual decision on May 5 to send the case of Paul Wilson Dorman, which had been before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit for more than a year, back to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) to answer several questions relating to Dorman and his partner’s civil union took the immigration and LGBT communities by surprise.
The case is
A few days earlier, on April 27, the Department of Justice had filed a motion — unopposed by Dorman’s lawyer — before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit to take virtually the same steps in the case.
For several reasons, however, the move went unnoted until Holder’s more public action on May 5.
Dorman’s attorney, Nicholas Mundy, tells Metro Weekly that Dorman’s request for a cancellation of his removal order initially was denied on March 4, 2009, “because he was found to be ineligible for that form of relief as a threshold matter because he did not have a qualifying relative for cancellation of removal, vis a vis a spouse.”
The BIA upheld that decision in a one-sentence opinion on January 27, 2010, according to Mundy. “And then we went to the Third Circuit.”
Over the course of 2010, briefs were filed in the case by Mundy for Dorman and by the Department of Justice. Dorman’s brief, filed in late July 2010, was more than a half-year before Holder would decide that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act
Of “I think my primary argument at the time … was Judge Tauro in Massachusetts.
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