WCT Profiles Julie Kruse
Posted on 05/19/2010 @ 04:34 PM
This week’s Windy City Times – Chicago’s LGBT weekly – profiles Immigration Equality’s policy director, Julie Kruse (pictured), who spent years honing her policy skills while working with progressive Illinois advocacy groups.
“Kruse came to the organization with a long background in activism behind her,” the paper reports. “After obtaining a master’s degree in education from Northwestern University, she was involved with Chicago-based social-justice groups, including, she said, community organizations in Humboldt Park and Pilsen, Chicago Women in Trades and the Center for Economic Progress, where she was Director of Advocacy and Strategic Partnerships. Kruse also served on the Illinois Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women.”
“I really do feel my work here connects with my work back there,” Kruse said. “I learned everything I’ve learned in Chicago.” Though she lives in Washington, D.C., Kruse said, she visits Chicago often: it’s where her partner lives.
Throughout the course of her political education, Kruse said, she became convinced of the importance of political lobbying. “You can’t create any social change without policy change,” she said.
Ongoing lobbying efforts by Immigration Equality, as well as other LGBT organizations, were apparent earlier this year when one of the organization’s major political goals was achieved: After two decades, a ban on immigration to the United States by HIV-positive people was lifted. Though the initial decision to change the rule had been signaled two years earlier by then-President George W. Bush, the full repeal of the ban depended on regulatory changes finally enacted by President Barack Obama.
With partner organizations, Immigration Equality has also lobbied for the inclusion of same-sex binational couples in any comprehensive immigration reform package considered by Congress. LGBT groups want to see provisions for same-sex partners to be able to sponsor one another for U.S. citizenship, an option currently available only married opposite-sex couples. The centerpiece of this legislative push has been the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA) , provisions of which were recently included in the immigration reform framework set forth by the Sens. Schumer, Menendez, and Reid.
“It’s extremely exciting that for the first time ever, our community has been included in a comprehensive immigration-reform bill,” Kruse said. “It’s a complete game-changer. We’ve gone from [being] supplicants to being included.”
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