On October 29, 2009, the President signed a new law that avoids the "widow penalty" that occurs when a pending application for permanent residence is terminated due to the untimely death of a U.S. citizen sponsoring spouse.  Before enactment of this law, if a U.S. citizen submitted an application for permanent residence, and the U.S. citizen died before the couple was married for two years, the application would be terminated.   With the new law, a foreign national who was married for less than two years at the time of their U.S. citizen spouse's death, can now self-petition for permanent residence.  

For foreign nationals who could have benefited from this in the past, they will have two years from the date of enactment of the legislation to self-petition under this new law.

In situations where the foreign national was married to a U.S. citizen for longer than two years before the U.S. citizen's death, the foreign national has always been able to self-petition, and is still be able to do this.

The new law also provides for surviving family members of other types of permanent residence applications to continue with the application even if the principal applicant dies.  These other types of permanent residence applications include applications for other preference family petitions (parents, siblings, adult children), employment-based petitions, and asylees and refugees.