National
U.S. balks at asylum for gay Saudi diplomat
Attorney says client faces ‘certain’ execution
The US Department of Homeland Security issued a preliminary ruling last week withholding political asylum for a gay Saudi diplomat
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a preliminary ruling last week withholding political asylum for a Saudi diplomat whose colleagues discovered he’s gay last year while he was assigned to Saudi Arabia’s consular office in Los Angeles.
The diplomat, Ali Ahmad Asseri, who served as first secretary to the consular office, applied for U.S. asylum in 2010 under a U.S. policy that offers asylum to foreign nationals belonging to a “particular social group,” including gays, who face persecution in their home country.
“It’s not a matter to be taken lightly and I’m sure the U.S. government is not taking it lightly,” said Ally Bolour, an American attorney representing Asseri. “It’s certain death,” he said, if his client is forced to return to Saudi Arabia.
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Bolour noted that gay sex is considered a crime punishable by execution under Saudi Arabia’s fundamentalist Islamic law. He said the country’s prosecutors routinely trump up sex-related charges against Saudi gays, effectively making homosexuality itself grounds for execution.
A recent U.S. State Department human rights report on Saudi Arabia says that under the country’s Islamic or Sharia law, consenting sexual relations between people of the same sex is “punishable by death or flogging.”
The DHS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Asseri’s asylum case. DHS has said in the past that it never comments on pending cases. An official at the State Department, which has listed Saudi Arabia among countries that persecute gays, also declined to comment, saying it doesn’t discuss pending cases.
Bolour said that as part of its routine procedure for asylum cases, the DHS referred Asseri’s case to an immigration judge for an automatic appeal. He said he’s hopeful that the judge, on behalf of a special U.S. immigration court, will approve the asylum application. Should the judge deny the application, Asseri will appeal the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals, Bolour said.
“There’s a process that these things go through,” he said. “It was not approved in the first instance when we applied. Obviously, I think it should have been approved. But it hasn’t been denied and so we’re still on course.”
Bolour declined to provide details on how the Saudi consular office in Los Angeles discovered that Asseri is gay.
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However, he told the Blade that an MSNBC News report in September 2010 that first reported Asseri’s request for U.S. political asylum accurately reported on the details of the case as of a year ago.
According to the MSNBC report, Asseri told the broadcast news outlet that he had worked for the Saudi consular office in L.A. for five years. He told MSNBC that he discovered several months before filing his asylum application that Saudi consulate employees, who suspected he was gay, followed him to gay bars.
“It was sometime after these discoveries, Asseri said, that consulate officials began harassing him, refusing to renew his diplomatic passport or provide him with badly needed medical treatment for a painful back ailment,” MSNBC reported.
Consulate officials also demanded that he return to Saudi Arabia, MSNBC reported.
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“My life is in great danger and if I go back to Saudi Arabia, they will kill me openly in broad daylight,” MSNBC quoted him as saying in September 2010.
News of the DHS preliminary decision to withhold approving Asseri’s asylum application was first reported last week by Saudi American journalist and blogger Rasheed Abou-Alshamh on his blog RasheedsWorld.com.
Abou-Alshamh reported in his blog that a Saudi dissident in Washington named Ali al-Ahmed told him the decision to withhold Asseri’s asylum request was “a political decision by the Obama administration,” which, according to al-Ahmed, is “afraid of upsetting the Saudis.”
In his blog posting, Abou-Alshamh did not disclose al-Ahmed’s source or sources for his claim that the Obama administration orchestrated the withholding of the asylum request based on an alleged desire not to offend Saudi Arabia.
Attorney Bolour called the claim “outrageous” and “ludicrous,” saying the DHS decision to refer the asylum application to an immigration court judge is a routine bureaucratic procedure far removed from the White House or the president.
According to the DHS website, an initial decision on an asylum case is made by an asylum officer with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is an arm of the DHS.
Officials with the LGBGT advocacy groups Lambda Legal and Immigration Equality said they were following the Asseri case even though they were not directly involved. Immigration Equality Legal Director Victoria Neilson said the case was unusual because it’s rare that a diplomat like Asseri applies for U.S. asylum on grounds of anti-gay persecution.
The Comings & Goings column is about sharing the professional successes of our community. We want to recognize those landing new jobs, new clients for their business, joining boards of organizations and other achievements. Please share your successes with us at [email protected].
Congratulations to Gil Pontes III on his recent appointment to the Financial Advisory Board for the City of Wilton Manors, Fla. Upon being appointed he said, “I’m honored to join the Financial Advisory Board for the City of Wilton Manors at such an important moment for our community. In my role as Executive Director of the NextGen Chamber of Commerce, I spend much of my time focused on economic growth, fiscal sustainability, and the long-term competitiveness of emerging business leaders. I look forward to bringing that perspective to Wilton Manors — helping ensure responsible stewardship of public resources while supporting a vibrant, inclusive local economy.”
Pontes is a nonprofit executive with years of development, operations, budget, management, and strategic planning experience in 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4), and political organizations. Pontes is currently executive director of NextGen, Chamber of Commerce. NextGen Chamber’s mission is to “empower emerging business leaders by generating insights, encouraging engagement, and nurturing leadership development to shape the future economy.” Prior to that he served as managing director of The Nora Project, and director of development also at The Nora Project. He has held a number of other positions including Major Gifts Officer, Thundermist Health Center, and has worked in both real estate and banking including as Business Solutions Adviser, Ironwood Financial. For three years he was a Selectman, Town of Berkley, Mass. In that role, he managed HR and general governance for town government. There were 200+ staff and 6,500 constituents. He balanced a $20,000,000 budget annually, established an Economic Development Committee, and hired the first town administrator.
Pontes earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
Kansas
ACLU sues Kansas over law invalidating trans residents’ IDs
A new Kansas bill requires transgender residents to have their driver’s licenses reflect their sex assigned at birth, invalidating current licenses.
Transgender people across Kansas received letters in the mail on Wednesday demanding the immediate surrender of their driver’s licenses following passage of one of the harshest transgender bathroom bans in the nation. Now the American Civil Liberties Union is filing a lawsuit to block the ban and protect transgender residents from what advocates describe as “sweeping” and “punitive” consequences.
Independent journalist Erin Reed broke the story Wednesday after lawmakers approved House Substitute for Senate Bill 244. In her reporting, Reed included a photo of the letter sent to transgender Kansans, requiring them to obtain a driver’s license that reflects their sex assigned at birth rather than the gender with which they identify.
According to the reporting, transgender Kansans must surrender their driver’s licenses and that their current credentials — regardless of expiration date — will be considered invalid upon the law’s publication. The move effectively nullifies previously issued identification documents, creating immediate uncertainty for those impacted.
House Substitute for Senate Bill 244 also stipulates that any transgender person caught driving without a valid license could face a class B misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. That potential penalty adds a criminal dimension to what began as an administrative action. It also compounds the legal risks for transgender Kansans, as the state already requires county jails to house inmates according to sex assigned at birth — a policy that advocates say can place transgender detainees at heightened risk.
Beyond identification issues, SB 244 not only bans transgender people from using restrooms that match their gender identity in government buildings — including libraries, courthouses, state parks, hospitals, and interstate rest stops — with the possibility for criminal penalties, but also allows for what critics have described as a “bathroom bounty hunter” provision. The measure permits anyone who encounters a transgender person in a restroom — including potentially in private businesses — to sue them for large sums of money, dramatically expanding the scope of enforcement beyond government authorities.
The lawsuit challenging SB 244 was filed today in the District Court of Douglas County on behalf of anonymous plaintiffs Daniel Doe and Matthew Moe by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Kansas, and Ballard Spahr LLP. The complaint argues that SB 244 violates the Kansas Constitution’s protections for personal autonomy, privacy, equality under the law, due process, and freedom of speech.
Additionally, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a temporary restraining order on behalf of the anonymous plaintiffs, arguing that the order — followed by a temporary injunction — is necessary to prevent the “irreparable harm” that would result from SB 244.
State Rep. Abi Boatman, a Wichita Democrat and the only transgender member of the Kansas Legislature, told the Kansas City Star on Wednesday that “persecution is the point.”
“This legislation is a direct attack on the dignity and humanity of transgender Kansans,” said Monica Bennett, legal director of the ACLU of Kansas. “It undermines our state’s strong constitutional protections against government overreach and persecution.”
“SB 244 is a cruel and craven threat to public safety all in the name of fostering fear, division, and paranoia,” said Harper Seldin, senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project. “The invalidation of state-issued IDs threatens to out transgender people against their will every time they apply for a job, rent an apartment, or interact with police. Taken as a whole, SB 244 is a transparent attempt to deny transgender people autonomy over their own identities and push them out of public life altogether.”
“SB 244 presents a state-sanctioned attack on transgender people aimed at silencing, dehumanizing, and alienating Kansans whose gender identity does not conform to the state legislature’s preferences,” said Heather St. Clair, a Ballard Spahr litigator working on the case. “Ballard Spahr is committed to standing with the ACLU and the plaintiffs in fighting on behalf of transgender Kansans for a remedy against the injustices presented by SB 244, and is dedicated to protecting the constitutional rights jeopardized by this new law.”
National
After layoffs at Advocate, parent company acquires ‘Them’ from Conde Nast
Top editorial staff let go last week
Former staff members at the Advocate and Out magazines revealed that parent company Equalpride laid off a number of employees late last week.
Those let go included Advocate editor-in-chief Alex Cooper, Pride.com editor-in-chief Rachel Shatto, brand partnerships manager Erin Manley, community editor Marie-Adélina de la Ferriére, and Out magazine staff writers Moises Mendez and Bernardo Sim, according to a report in Hollywood Reporter.
Cooper, who joined the company in 2021, posted to social media that, “Few people have had the privilege of leading this legendary LGBTQ+ news outlet, and I’m deeply honored to have been one of them. To my team: thank you for the last four years. You’ve been the best. For those also affected today, please let me know how I can support you.”
The Advocate’s PR firm when reached by the Blade said it no longer represents the company. Emails to the Advocate went unanswered.
Equalpride on Friday announced it acquired “Them,” a digital LGBTQ outlet founded in 2017 by Conde Nast.
“Equalpride exists to elevate, celebrate and protect LGBTQ+ storytelling at scale,” Equalpride CEO Mark Berryhill said according to Hollywood Reporter. “By combining the strengths of our brands with this respected digital platform, we’re creating a unified ecosystem that delivers even more impact for our audiences, advertisers, and community partners.”
It’s not clear if “Them” staff would take over editorial responsibilities for the Advocate and Out.
Comings & Goings
Kansas passes bathroom bounty hunter bill
ACLU sues Kansas over law invalidating trans residents’ IDs
After layoffs at Advocate, parent company acquires ‘Them’ from Conde Nast
Spring into sold
New book profiles LGBTQ Ukrainians, documents war experiences
PHOTOS: Queen of Hearts
Two very different views of the State of the Union
Va. activists preparing campaign in support of repealing marriage amendment
