King Hall's Aoki Center, Immigration Clinic Win Major Victory in Citizenship Dispute
In an effort spearheaded by Professors Rose Cuison Villazor and Leticia Saucedo, the Aoki Center for Critical Race and Nation Studies and Immigration Law Clinic won a derivative citizenship case on behalf of Marianne Wilson Kuroda. The King Hall team's success brought to conclusion a complicated legal dispute with roots in the World War II era's racial exclusion laws and a convoluted family law story that spanned more than six decades.
Born in 1949 to an American government employee father and Swedish-Japanese mother, Wilson Kuroda's claim to U.S. citizenship had been in question as a result of federal and military regulations against interracial marriage that prevented her parents from marrying. When her father, James Vaughn, was forced to return to the United States, his efforts to bring the child and her mother into the country were thwarted by laws that deemed them racially inadmissible.
Vaughn, who lived in Nevada, succeeded in persuading a Nevada U.S. senator to sponsor special legislation allowing them to immigrate, but Wilson Kuroda's mother died in 1950 on the day it was passed. Wilson Kuroda was kidnapped by a nanny, and in 1956 the child was at the center of Sweden v. Yamaguchi, a well-known international family law case that awarded her custody to the Swedish Ambassador to Japan. She grew up splitting time between the ambassador's family, the nanny's family, and foster care. Years later, Wilson Kuroda initiated a search for her father and was unfortunately not able to reunite with him before he died in 2003. She was, however, able to meet her half-brother.
IN 2012, Wilson Kuroda became aware of Professor Villazor's article,"The Other Loving: Uncovering the Federal Government's Racial Regulation of Marriage" and contacted her, believing that based upon Villazor's research, she had a claim to U.S. citizenship. Professors Villazor and Saucedo, working with David Canela '16, J.J. Mulligan '15, Emily Wilson '13, and Andrea Wu '15, put together evidence that Vaughn had taken sufficient steps to legitimize Wilson Kuroda during her childhood and on her behalf, they filed an application for a U.S. passport at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo in January 2016. On June 6, the U.S. Embassy approved the request, essentially recognizing her as a U.S. citizen.