Dangerous wait for freedom: Hurdles abound for transgender migrants seeking asylum in US

WASHINGTON – Regina King just wanted to be herself. But in her home country of Guyana, it was difficult.

As a child, her peers ridiculed King, who had not yet identified as transgender. As an adult, men assaulted her in her hometown of Georgetown for being perceived as “feminine.”

In her early 20s, she tried to start over, moving to a smaller, more remote town in the interior of Guyana, where King said there was less crime. Her life got better in the first couple of years but the violence she had tried to flee found her once more.

One turning point: A man attacked her at knifepoint after leaving a party. She tried to fight him off but was hit on her shoulder.

“All the things that I've been through with all of the attacks ... I thought that the country is not for me,” King said. “I have to move. I have to find a place that was safe for me to be myself.”

In 2014, King decided to take a risk and come to the United States on a travel visa to visit her aunt in New York. When she arrived, she was connected with resources for the LGBTQ community, including services that could help her begin the process of seeking asylum in the U.S. After a three-year process that included physical evidence and witnesses that corroborated her life, King won asylum.

“I feel very, very safe and I feel that the whole process was worth it,” King said of now living in the United States. “My life just changed for the better.”

King, 36, is one of the hundreds of transgender migrants who advocates say attempt to seek asylum in the United States each year, often fleeing violence and discrimination in their home countries. But the process, where the majority of trans migrants come to the United States through the country's southern border, isn’t easy. Transgender migrants are often forced to wait months – or even years – in Mexico, a country that is dangerous for LGBTQ individuals.

“I don't think you can overstate the seriousness of the consequences for people that we're turning away,” said Bridget Crawford, the legal director at Immigration Equality, a nonprofit that represents LGBTQ and HIV-positive individuals in the immigration system.

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Advocates say the process has not been made easier with a new presidency, as the Biden administration continues to use restrictive border policies. They point specifically to Title 42, a Donald Trump-era policy implemented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that allows border agents to expel asylum seekers to Mexico to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

“There's not an alternative for trans folks to access the system,” Crawford said. “And I think that is really problematic, because they’re some of the most vulnerable asylum seekers or refugees, and yet, through all of these different sorts of impediments that we're putting in our way, we're stopping people from accessing protection.”

Danger in their home countries

Many migrants who come to the U.S.-Mexico border are seeking better job opportunities or are fleeing violence in their home countries.

Those factors motivate transgender individuals, too, as well as another major reason: Their lives and human rights are often under attack back home.

"A lot of people will say just singularly, 'I've never been able to live a day in my life without being afraid,' and trans people in particular, sometimes they will transition and they're like, 'As soon as I transition it just got 10 times worse,' " said Emem Maurus, a Tijuana, Mexico-based attorney with the Transgender Law Center.

Advocates say many transgender asylum seekers are from countries with restricted rights for people who are part of LGBTQ communities. Some advocates work with individuals coming to the U.S.-Mexico border from Latin America countries such as Honduras and Brazil, but also from Jamaica, Russia and African countries such as Ghana and Cameroon.

“LGBT people, or trans people in this case, often will say their single motivator (for seeking asylum) was their identity, their gender identity, or expression, or what they want to be,” Maurus said. “We have a lot of people who come who are like, 'I'm trans. I haven't taken hormones yet. I (have) just been trying to survive as a gay person. That's tough enough.' ”

There is limited data as to how many transgender people have come to the United States to seek asylum, but advocates say hundreds have come to the southern border this year alone. According to the UCLA Williams Institute, almost 1.3 million immigrants identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender as of 2021, including 289,700 individuals who are undocumented. The National Center for Transgender Equality estimates there are between 15,000 are 50,000 undocumented migrants living in the United States who identify as transgender.

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Advocates warn that while some individuals may not be out as transgender or part of the LGBTQ community in their home country, they’re not immune from violence if they are perceived to be someone who is gay, or too feminine or masculine. Transgender individuals have detailed violent sexual assaults, sometimes at the hands of family or the police, as reasons why they are seeking asylum at the border, advocates told USA TODAY.

Corrective rape, as it is known, is when a person rapes a member of the LGBTQ community in attempt to punish them or change their sexual orientation. Incidents of this type of rape have occurred in the United States as well as some countries where individuals are migrating from.

While transgender individuals can still face violence or discrimination in the United States – a record number of transgender and gender nonconforming individuals have been killed in the U.S. this year – many believe it’s a safer option than their home countries.

“The United States obviously is not perfect when it comes to treating transgender people with respect,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of National Center for Transgender Equality. “But there's even less acceptance, and there's even more hostility towards transgender people, in many other countries."

Title 42 restrictions

Immigration and LGBTQ advocates warn that the options for transgender individuals wanting to seek asylum in the United States are limited.

While some individuals, such as King, are able to first come to the United States on student or travel visas, many try to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. But that has become more difficult in recent years.

Currently, the majority of migrants coming to the United States' southern border are being turned away or expelled due to Title 42. For some transgender individuals, being returned to their home country could result in state sanctions, such as being jailed. Being expelled to Mexico, where there are limited shelters for transgender individuals, could also put them at risk, advocates said.

“You're foreclosed from bringing asylum,” Crawford said of Title 42, saying the policy “is violating our own laws and instead sending people back to – in the case of trans people – to often brutal, brutal rape, and murder, and often state sanctions."

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Under international and federal law, individuals coming to the United States should be allowed to apply for asylum. Immigrant rights activists and experts have argued that Title 42 takes away that right.

The Department of Homeland Security responded to the criticism in a statement, saying, "Humanitarian exceptions have been available and used since the CDC Order went into effect, and DHS continues to have authority ... to grant humanitarian and other exceptions to Title 42, on a case-by-case basis."

In addition, the Biden administration was forced by the courts to reimplement the Migrant Protection Protocols, a policy that forces migrants to wait in Mexico for their immigration hearing. DHS has appealed the ruling and has released a new memo ending the program once the court injunction has been lifted. That policy will likely crowd the already limited shelter space available for transgender people, who could then be put at risk of violence, advocates said.

‘Coerced into sex work’

As many migrants are stuck in limbo along the U.S.-Mexico border, transgender migrants experience a higher level of danger as they wait to move forward in the asylum process.

For example, Maurus noted there are limited shelters that are safe for members of the LGBTQ community in Tapachula, a city in southern Mexico where many migrants are kept from moving north to the border.

“We regularly have people calling us, and they're sleeping in the streets,” Maurus said. “They're being often coerced into sex work or kidnapped, all while they're waiting for their Mexican residency so they can leave and try and get to the United States, which of course is going to create an another hurdle.”

Some transgender migrants are also turned away from shelters due to racism and for not speaking Spanish, some advocates said. Maurus noted that Black migrants face heightened racism at some shelters due to the recent influx of Haitian migrants in the area.

“Racism affects folks at every single footstep of a migration journey,” Maurus said. “If you don’t speak Spanish, it's harder to secure shelter space.”

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On the U.S. side, some advocates also warn that transgender individuals are often misgendered when taken into Customs and Border Protection custody or Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, which could lead to attacks from other inmates.

“When individuals are forced to be in detention camps that do not recognize their gender identity, oftentimes they're being put in situations where they face violence,” said Shalawn James, executive director at AsylumConnect, an organization that connects LGBTQ asylum seekers to resources. “They are sexually abused, physically abused, mentally abused.”

Heng-Lehtinen of the National Center for Transgender Equality said some Customs and Border Protection and ICE officials don’t know where to put transgender individuals, so they are sometimes placed in solitary confinement. This affects their mental health and could also lead to neglect from medical staff “because no one is paying attention to you,” he said.

And if some transgender individuals are able to get their asylum claim adjudicated by an immigration officer or judge, they often do not have legal representation, Crawford said.

Crawford noted as an example that some asylum officials look at recent laws passed by countries that could seem pro-LGBTQ, but the reality is that members of that community, particularly transgender individuals, still face violence and discrimination.

“Sometimes those cases are challenging because there might be laws on the books or there might be some examples to point to, to say, ‘Oh, there's tolerance here for the LGBTQ community,’ but then there's persistent violence and increased violence, especially against trans people,” Crawford said.

What needs to change in the asylum process?

Some advocates say one of the quickest things the Biden administration could do to help transgender migrants seeking asylum is to end Title 42.

“The whole point of seeking asylum is to get out of the area that you are in that is not safe,” said James of AsylumConnect. “So Title 42 putting that stop on individuals being able to come to United States ... is absolutely even more dangerous for them.”

Crawford said the refugee process should also be revamped, adding that LGBTQ individuals don’t have the same access to refugee processing and that could be “inherently dangerous for some transgender or other members of the LGBTQ community to stay in refugee camps as they await the process."

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“In a sense, asylum is really the only way a lot of LGBTQ and trans people can access protection,” she said. “I think that's really scary when we think of things like places like Afghanistan, where the answer is kind of to go through the general (United Nations) refugee processing procedures, but we know that those processes don't traditionally capture a lot of the LGBTQ refugees that are out there.”

For King, seeking asylum in the United States was a “very rigorous, thorough process.” She said that individuals are going to have to retell their life story over and over again throughout the process.

But she also offered advice to those who want to undergo the long process.

“Believe in yourself and never try to move away from who you are to please anyone,” she said. “I believe that we all have that power inside of us that we have what it takes to change our own situations.”

Contributing: Alia E. Dastagir

Reach Rebecca Morin at Twitter @RebeccaMorin_

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Transgender migrants hit immigration hurdles when seeking asylum in US