Refugee sues to marry

Two weeks before their wedding, Viet "Victor" Anh Vo and his fiancee 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 told The Associated Press during an interview in his Lafayette hometown.

A Republican lawmaker who sponsored January's changes in the state's marriage laws said it was designed to crack down on people using fraudulent marriages to gain visas and citizenship.

Vo's suit, which is believed to be the first of its kind, claims the law violates his constitutional rights and was intended to discriminate against foreign-born people.

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. Vietnamese and Indonesian authorities didn't officially recognize his birth or issue his family a birth certificate, according to his suit.

That wouldn't have been an insurmountable hurdle for Vo if he and his U.S.-born fiancee, 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, whereas U.S.-born applicants who can't produce a birth certificate are still eligible for judicial waivers.

Vo's lawsuit says the law imposes a "complex web of new and sometimes unobtainable requirements" on foreign-born applicants beyond birth certificates, such as making them present a passport from their country of birth or an unexpired visa.

"Without the court's intervention, Mr. Vo — and others like him across the state — will continue to suffer irreparable injury from his inability to legally marry in his community, or anywhere in the state, under Louisiana state law," it says.

State Health Secretary Rebekah Gee, whose department compiles marriage licenses and other vital records, and the court clerks for three south Louisiana parishes are among the defendants.

Vo is represented by attorneys from the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice and the National Immigration Law Center, a Los Angeles-based group that advocates for immigrants' rights. Alvaro Huerta, a staff attorney for the latter group, said he doesn't know of any other state with a marriage license law like Louisiana's.