The State Department Is Really Fucking Over International Queer Couples with Children

File this under “Bonkers shit we missed last week because of the constant shitstorm that is the Trump administration”—a gay couple is suing the State Department because only one of their twin sons who were born minutes apart was granted citizenship.

If you’re saying “Huh?” right now, let me break it down:

Andrew and Elad Dvash-Banks are a couple now living in Los Angeles. Andrew is a US citizen, while Elad is a non-citizen from Israel. While living in Canada, they married, and the two used a surrogate to have their twins, Aiden and Ethan. Under law, children born to a US citizen abroad are also granted citizenship, even if they’re married to non-citizens. So when they went to the American consulate in Toronto to apply for citizenship for their two sons, it should have been relatively easy, right?

WRONG. They were told that they needed to undergo DNA tests to—and this is where it gets weird — prove whose sperm conceived their sons. Under US law, and as the State Department website states, “The U.S. citizen parent must be the genetic or the gestational parent” of the child in order to obtain citizenship. As only one of their children came from sperm with the imprimatur of the US government, bingo, only one of their kids became a citizen. The other is essentially now an undocumented immigrant, here on a six-month tourist visa.

It should be noted that the vast majority of straight couples in similar situations aren’t asked to undergo these kinds of DNA interrogations (though as one legal scholar told the Los Angeles Times, those who use surrogates or sperm donors abroad can run into roadblocks as well). A separate lawsuit was also filed on the same day, on behalf of two women, only one a US citizen, who got married in London and who each gave birth. Like the Dvash-Banks, only one of their children was granted US citizenship.

As Aaron Morris, executive director of the LGBT rights organization Immigration Equality, put it: “If a mother and father walk into a consulate and have a marriage certificate and birth certificate, they’re never asked any questions about the biology of the child. But the converse is also true and every same-sex couple will be asked that.”

Maybe it’s time for the State Department to acknowledge that families are created in a myriad of ways. And given that some Republicans are pushing to end birthright citizenship altogether, the fact that our government is interrogating the genetic material of children born to queer couples should make all of us very, very worried.