How societies welcome their most vulnerable tells us much about their strength and capacity to prosper and thrive. Do nations and communities exclude people based on who they are, or do they include them and invite their many contributions?
Members of the LGBTIQ+ community are among the most vulnerable of all populations in the Americas. Often they must migrate due to persecution, further increasing their vulnerability because of the marginalization migrants frequently endure, especially if they are Black, Indigenous, or otherwise non-White.
States’ responses to LGBTIQ+ migrants are vastly deficient throughout the hemisphere, including in the United States. They constitute a growing human rights crisis and a major lost opportunity for progress and prosperity.
1. Push factors in the region are driving members of the LGBTIQ+ community to migrate
While security threats or inability to participate meaningfully in the economy and society force many people to migrate from Latin America, LGBTIQ+ people suffer especially acute violence, discrimination, and persecution in ways related to their identity.
Despite progress made in recent decades, many LGBTIQ+ people throughout the Americas live under constant fear of attacks, which are frequent, as are threats. Violence often goes beyond simple assault to include abductions, torture, and sexual abuse. Police forces and justice systems rarely investigate or prosecute these cases, and at times, the victim’s own family members are the perpetrators.
The San Diego and Tijuana-based legal aid group Al Otro Lado told Border Report in 2023 that of 420 LGBTIQ+ migrants they had interviewed, one in five was a victim of kidnapping and one in four a victim of sexual violence, while half said they had received threats. The Mexican organization Letra S counted more than 760 murders of LGBTIQ+ people in Mexico between 2014 and 2023.
More murders of trans people happen in Latin America than in any other region of the world: 74 percent of the total documented by Transrespect Versus Transphobia Worldwide between October 2022 and September 2023. In Colombia in 2024, the organization Caribe Afirmativo counted 164 homicides of LGBTIQ+ people—one every two days. The total in Brazil is greater, according to a 2019 study by Letra ESE cited at El Paso Matters. “The average life expectancy of trans women in Latin America is 35 years old, which reflects that many die as a result of killings,” the Inter-American Human Rights Commission reported in 2015.
Discrimination against LGBTIQ+ people, while hardly rare in the United States, is rife throughout the Americas. It makes employment difficult to obtain regardless of qualifications. Landlords routinely refuse access to housing. Basic medical attention is often out of reach, especially for those who are HIV positive or transitioning. That is what happened to Alejandra Monocuco, a trans sex worker in Bogotá who died from COVID complications after paramedics refused to treat her when they found out she was HIV positive.
International law—the Refugee Convention of 1951—and U.S. law—the Refugee Act of 1980—guarantee the right to seek asylum for people facing risks to their life or freedom if forced to return to their countries of origin. Section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act states clearly that anyone on U.S. soil cannot be sent back to their country of origin without due process if they voice fear of return due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. As they face threats, violence, and discrimination throughout the national territory of the states they have fled, many LGBTIQ+ migrants are strong candidates for asylum in the United States, often under the “particular social group” definition.
Asylum needs remain urgent and immediate even as the Trump administration, claiming an “invasion” at the border, has shut down access to asylum at the border since January 20. While the asylum shutdown has reduced the number of people awaiting in Mexican border towns for a chance to seek protection in the United States, the LGBTIQ+ asylum-seeking population remains high: people in shelters established to assist them have nowhere else to go. At the Casa Frida shelter in Tapachula, near Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, the Associated Press reported in March that “help requests… have not dropped.”
Along the migration route, a handful of private charity-run shelters and other services for LGBTIQ+ people fleeing violence are often the only facilities that keep their doors open to them. Some general-population shelters, too, have adjusted their spaces to ensure this population’s safety and well-being.
The Trump administration’s cuts to foreign assistance have hit some of these small grassroots efforts hard. At least half of LGBTIQ+ shelters that attend to this population are now scrambling for resources. The Casa Frida shelter network lost 60 percent of its funds after the January aid freeze; director Raúl Caporal told TruthOut that he is unsure how to meet needs like 54,000 meals served each day in Mexico City, Tapachula, and Monterrey, Mexico.
2. LGBTIQ+ people face severe risks on the migration route
While migrants can be victimized throughout the journey, the 1,100 to 2,500-mile migration route across Mexico is notoriously dangerous: migrants often say that it is more treacherous than the Darien Gap, because of the frequency with which organized crime, kidnappers, human traffickers, corrupt officials, and unscrupulous businesses prey on them. Mexico’s judicial system can point to shockingly few cases of successful investigations or prosecutions of those who commit crimes against migrants, even though assaults, kidnappings, and sexual violence happen with stunning daily regularity.
For LGBTIQ+ migrants, any indication of their sexuality or non-traditional gender identity multiplies their vulnerability as they struggle to cross Mexico. They become especially easy targets. “Transgender women often dress as men to avoid mockery and being spotted by criminals,” a shelter worker told the AP.
LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers told Human Rights Watch in 2022 that Mexican immigration agents, police, and National Guard soldiers specifically targeted them for extortion, while some colluded with organized criminals who kidnapped and assaulted them. Migrants who are detained by Mexican authorities also face discrimination and a lack of specific space within detention centers; trans migrants have reported authorities placing them in cells along with individuals from their biological sex.
Finding shelter in Mexico is especially hard for LGBTIQ+ migrants. As noted above, many of the limited shelters that provide specific refuge for the LGBTIQ+ community have seen their budgets decimated by the Trump administration’s aid cuts. Few migrants are able to find work to pay for necessities along the way or if staying for longer periods in Mexico, and some are “forced or coerced into sex work as the only way to pay for food, housing and their transitions,” the San Diego Union-Tribune reported in 2023.
Should they suffer illness, nearly all migrants find it very difficult to access Mexico’s public health system. LGBTIQ+ migrants’ particular needs like gender-affirming care and, in some cases, antiretroviral therapy, are out of reach for nearly all.
3. Policies that restrict access to asylum and other protections do particular harm to LGBTIQ+ migrants
If they can make it to the U.S. asylum system, LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers usually have strong arguments. A 2021 study by UCLA Law School’s Williams Institute found that of 11,400 LGBTIQ+ migrants who applied for asylum between 2012 and 2017, 4,385 made claims related to their LGBTIQ+ status, and 98 percent passed their initial credible fear or reasonable fear interviews with asylum officers. While Mexico may not be safe for all LGBTIQ+ migrants, or indeed many LGBTIQ+ Mexicans, conditions vary by region and jurisdiction, and some have decided to seek protection in the country. In Tapachula, about 85 percent of LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers lodged at Casa Frida have been granted asylum in Mexico’s system.
“Trans asylum seekers’ claims fit more neatly into asylum law requirements than those of many others,” noted San Diego-based journalist Kate Morrissey, who has covered this issue extensively, adding that the scars that many bear from past attacks give testimony that further strengthens their petitions for asylum, Convention Against Torture protection, withholding of removal, or other protection in the United States.
The urgency of LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers’ needs, and the particular dangers they face while stranded in many regions of Mexico, make all the more cruel and deadly the curbs on asylum access that the Trump and Biden administration administrations have put in place over the past eight years. These included:
- the “Remain in Mexico” policy (2019-2021 and briefly in 2021-2022) that required many nationalities’ asylum seekers to await their U.S. court dates in Mexico, often in high-crime border cities;
- the “Title 42” pandemic policy that shut down asylum access for all nationalities who could easily be returned to Mexico, often to dangerous border towns, even if asylum seekers expressed fear;
- the Biden administration’s 2024 ban on asylum access between official ports of entry which summarily returned people to Mexico; and now
- The Trump administration’s shutdown of nearly all protection anywhere at the border since January 20, 2025, which included the cancellation of all appointments at ports of entry that the Biden administration had permitted using the CBP One smartphone app.
A database of alleged CBP human rights abuses that WOLA maintained between 2020 and 2023 included over 12 examples of border agents denying asylum access to LGBTIQ+ migrants, often despite urgent pleas for protection.
Rather than invest in processing, immigration courts, and alternatives to detention to make the U.S. asylum system fairer, faster, and more efficient, the Biden and especially the Trump administrations have kept this system small, unreformed, and overburdened. Instead of reform, successive U.S. administrations have sought ways to chip away at the asylum statute in U.S. immigration law and deny asylum access.
The Trump administration has brought the cruelty to a new level, adding a layer of carelessness. In a May 16 court filing, ICE recognized that it erroneously deported a gay Guatemalan man to Mexico despite his claims of fear. In February, an immigration judge had granted the man withholding of removal protecting him from return to Guatemala—so ICE quickly removed him to Mexico, even though he had been raped and kidnapped there and pleaded not to be sent back. ICE officials initially claimed that the man had not expressed fear, but are now blaming the omission on a software glitch, Politico reported.
When LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers get pushed out of the United States, going back home is almost never an option for them. They are stranded in Mexico. If they are Mexican, they are in the country they originally needed to flee. If they are from third countries, they carry the additional vulnerability of being noncitizens, often lacking documentation. “Waiting near the U.S.-Mexico border is increasingly dangerous,” reported Chantal Flores at Yes! magazine in March. “Most migrants in Matamoros [an organized crime-dominated city across from Brownsville, Texas] remain in shelters due to threats of being kidnapped and robbed.”
4. LGBTIQ+ migrants are more vulnerable to abuse by U.S. immigration enforcement agencies like CBP and ICE
LGBTIQ+ migrants routinely suffer abuse at the hands of U.S. border and migration authorities, especially while in custody. In a 2024 report, Immigration Equality interviewed 41 detained or formerly detained LGBTIQ+ or HIV-positive people who said “they were targeted for a broad range of abuses from ICE and CBP staff, and other detained individuals whose behavior went unchecked by authorities.” One-third reported “sexual abuse, physical assaults or sexual harassment” while in ICE or CBP custody, about half were placed in solitary confinement, and nearly all suffered verbal abuse.
“Transgender people make up a tiny fraction of those in immigration custody—perhaps a few dozen on any given day,” the Intercept reported in March. “But there have been long-standing reports of physical and sexual assault, prolonged solitary confinement, verbal abuse from staff and fellow detainees, and the denial of medical care such as HIV medication and hormone therapy.”
In 2018, a transgender woman from Honduras, Roxsana Hernández Rodríguez, died after 16 days in ICE custody. The stated cause of death was severe dehydration and HIV complications, but an independent autopsy reported by the New York Times found evidence of physical abuse. In their home country, trans women in Honduras face multiple forms of violence and suffer the consequences of structural impunity.
Now, the Trump administration is weakening existing ICE guidelines that sought to protect LGBTIQ+ migrants in custody. Rules governing the agency’s contractors’ treatment of transgender people are being deleted from contracts with private detention companies, part of the White House’s ongoing effort to deny the very existence of trans people or to view LGBTIQ+ people as deserving of inclusion. At the same time, the administration has fired nearly all staff at two internal oversight bodies—the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) and Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman (OIDO)—leaving migrants who suffer abuse with even less recourse.
5. Fixing our asylum system would greatly benefit the LGBTIQ+ community
For people who need to flee, the United States should build on one of its historic strengths: being a place that welcomes new people and gives them greater safety, more accountable governance, and a fuller ability to participate in economic prosperity. The United States is moving alarmingly quickly away from that vision right now, though even when momentum was in a more positive direction, its antiquated immigration laws were an impediment.
The limited number of legal pathways to migrate to the United States made asylum the only option: for most nationalities in the Americas, the so-called “right way” to apply for work and residency often takes decades, if it is even possible at all. Though LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers tend to have strong asylum cases, this should not be the only way for talented, energetic, creative people to reside in and contribute to the culture, economy, and public life of the United States.
For now, though, seeking asylum remains one of very few available options. That is a strong reason to reform the rickety U.S. asylum system, not dismantle or block people from it in violation of U.S. and international human rights law.
“Reform” means having the resources in place to hand down fair decisions, with knowledgeable legal representation, outside of detention, in shorter amounts of time—usually months, not several years as is usually the case now. (Shorter decision times, handed down by a far larger corps of judges and asylum officers, would reduce the likelihood of thousands of people per day coming to the border.)
“Resources” mean sufficient personnel and infrastructure to carry out asylum and refugee adjudication, representation, case management, and processing. Meeting those needs would cost a minuscule fraction of the more than $160 billion that the U.S. Congress is currently moving toward spending on walls, detention, deportations, and crackdowns.
LGBTIQ+ migrants are one of the hemisphere’s most vulnerable populations. The U.S. and region-wide response to them will tell us much about the kind of society we are becoming.
