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Biden administration ends ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy

Trump-era program made LGBTQ asylum seekers even more vulnerable

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A portion of the fence that marks the Mexico-U.S. border in Tijuana, Mexico, on Feb. 25, 2020. The Biden administration has ended a Trump-era policy that forced asylum seekers to pursue their cases in Mexico. (Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)

The Biden administration has officially ended a policy that forced asylum seekers to pursue their cases in Mexico.

The previous White House’s Migrant Protection Protocols program, which became known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, took effect in 2019. Advocates sharply criticized MPP, in part, because it made LGBTQ asylum seekers who were forced to live in Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Matamoros and other Mexican border cities even more vulnerable to violence and persecution based on their gender identity and sexual orientation.

The White House in January suspended enrollment in MPP shortly after President Biden took office.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday in a memo he sent to acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Troy Miller, acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tae Johnson and acting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Tracy Renaud that announced the end of the Trump-era policy said roughly 11,200 asylum seekers with MPP cases have been allowed into the U.S. between Feb. 19 and May 25. Estuardo Cifuentes, a gay man from Guatemala who ran Rainbow Bridge Asylum Seekers, a program for LGBTQ asylum seekers and migrants in Matamoros that the Resource Center Matamoros, a group that provides assistance to asylum seekers and migrants in the Mexican border city, helped create, is among them.

“MPP does not adequately or sustainably enhance border management in such a way as to justify the program’s extensive operational burdens and other shortfalls,” wrote Mayorkas in his memo.

“In deciding whether to maintain, modify, or terminate MPP, I have reflected on my own deeply held belief, which is shared throughout this administration, that the United States is both a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants, committed to increasing access to justice and offering protection to people fleeing persecution and torture through an asylum system that reaches decisions in a fair and timely manner,” he added. “To that end, the department is currently considering ways to implement long-needed reforms to our asylum system that are designed to shorten the amount of time it takes for migrants, including those seeking asylum, to have their cases adjudicated, while still ensuring adequate procedural safeguards and increasing access to counsel.”

Steve Roth, executive director of the Organization of Refuge, Asylum and Migration, a Minnesota-based organization that works with LGBTQ refugees and migrants around the world, welcomed the end of MPP.

“We’re very happy to see, at long last, the termination of the dangerous and illegal ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy that was put in place by the Trump administration in early 2019,” Roth told the Washington Blade in a statement. “This policy forced asylum seekers at our Southern border — including many LGBTIQ individuals — to spend months and sometimes years in dangerous Mexican border towns while they waited for their asylum cases to be processed.” 

Roth added MPP “was not in keeping with the United States’ commitments to international asylum law and it was not reflective of who we are as a country.”

“We’re grateful to President Biden and his administration for overturning this policy and for their commitment to a just and humane immigration and asylum system,” he said.

Immigration Equality Legal Director Bridget Crawford echoed Roth.

“President Trump created a humanitarian disaster with this policy that has resulted in well over a thousand asylum seekers being assaulted, raped, kidnapped or murdered while awaiting their asylum hearing, including LGBTQ and HIV-positive people,” Crawford told the Blade in a statement. 

Ending MPP is the latest in a series of steps the Biden administration has taken to reverse the previous White House’s hardline immigration policies.

State Department spokesperson Ned Price told the Blade last month that protecting migrants and asylum seekers who are fleeing persecution based on their gender identity and sexual orientation is one of the administration’s global LGBTQ rights priorities.

Vice President Kamala Harris is among the administration officials who have publicly acknowledged that anti-LGBTQ violence is a “root cause” of migration from Central America. Texas Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, whose district includes the border city of El Paso, and others have noted to the Blade that Title 42, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rule that closed the Southern border to most asylum seekers and migrants because of the coronavirus pandemic, remains in place.

Congress has yet to consider a comprehensive immigration reform bill that Democrats introduced in February. Crawford in her statement also notes Mayorkas’ memo “does not address the many thousands of individuals who were wrongfully denied relief under the MPP program.” 

“These people no longer have ‘active’ cases, so they are not being processed by the administration, but many are living in Mexico or have been returned back to their countries where they face persecution.  Quite literally, some of these people have been handed a death sentence,” said Crawford. “The Biden administration has not addressed these cases yet and whether people wrongfully denied relief under the MPP program will have an opportunity to renew their claims.” 

Estuardo Cifuentes outside a port of entry in Brownsville, Texas, on March 3, 2021, shortly after he entered the U.S. (Photo courtesy of Estuardo Cifuentes)
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U.S. Federal Courts

Second federal lawsuit filed against White House passport policy

Two of seven plaintiffs live in Md.

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Lambda Legal on April 25 filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of seven transgender and nonbinary people who are challenging the Trump-Vance administration’s passport policy.

The lawsuit, which Lambda Legal filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland in Baltimore, alleges the policy that bans the State Department from issuing passports with “X” gender markers “has caused and is causing grave and immediate harm to transgender people like plaintiffs, in violation of their constitutional rights to equal protection.”

Two of the seven plaintiffs — Jill Tran and Peter Poe — live in Maryland. The State Department, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the federal government are defendants.

“The discriminatory passport policy exposes transgender U.S. citizens to harassment, abuse, and discrimination, in some cases endangering them abroad or preventing them from traveling, by forcing them to use identification documents that share private information against their wishes,” said Lambda Legal in a press release.

Zander Schlacter, a New York-based textile artist and designer, is the lead plaintiff.

The lawsuit notes he legally changed his name and gender in New York.

Schlacter less than a week before President Donald Trump’s inauguration “sent an expedited application to update his legal name on his passport, using form DS-5504.”

Trump once he took office signed an executive order that banned the State Department from issuing passports with “X” gender markers. The lawsuit notes Schlacter received his new passport in February.

“The passport has his correct legal name, but now has an incorrect sex marker of ‘F’ or ‘female,'” notes the lawsuit. “Mr. Schlacter also received a letter from the State Department notifying him that ‘the date of birth, place of birth, name, or sex was corrected on your passport application,’ with ‘sex’ circled in red. The stated reason was ‘to correct your information to show your biological sex at birth.'”

“I, like many transgender people, experience fear of harassment or violence when moving through public spaces, especially where a photo ID is required,” said Schlacter in the press release that announced the lawsuit. “My safety is further at risk because of my inaccurate passport. I am unwilling to subject myself and my family to the threat of harassment and discrimination at the hands of border officials or anyone who views my passport.”

Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken in June 2021 announced the State Department would begin to issue gender-neutral passports and documents for American citizens who were born overseas.

Dana Zzyym, an intersex U.S. Navy veteran who identifies as nonbinary, in 2015 filed a federal lawsuit against the State Department after it denied their application for a passport with an “X” gender marker. Zzyym in October 2021 received the first gender-neutral American passport.

Lambda Legal represented Zzyym.

The State Department policy took effect on April 11, 2022.

Trump signed his executive order shortly after he took office in January. Germany, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands are among the countries that have issued travel advisories for trans and nonbinary people who plan to visit the U.S.

A federal judge in Boston earlier this month issued a preliminary injunction against the executive order.  The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of seven trans and nonbinary people.

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Federal Government

HHS to retire 988 crisis lifeline for LGBTQ youth

Trevor Project warns the move will ‘put their lives at risk’

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. appears on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" in April 2024. (Screen capture via YouTube)

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is planning to retire the national 988 crisis lifeline for LGBTQ youth on Oct. 1, according to a preliminary budget document obtained by the Washington Post.

Introduced during the Biden-Harris administration in 2022, the hotline connects callers with counselors who are trained to work with this population, who are four times likelier to attempt suicide than their cisgender or heterosexual counterparts.

“Suicide prevention is about risk, not identity,” said Jaymes Black, CEO of the Trevor Project, which provides emergency crisis support for LGBTQ youth and has contracted with HHS to take calls routed through 988.

“Ending the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline’s LGBTQ+ youth specialized services will not just strip away access from millions of LGBTQ+ kids and teens — it will put their lives at risk,” they said in a statement. “These programs were implemented to address a proven, unprecedented, and ongoing mental health crisis among our nation’s young people with strong bipartisan support in Congress and signed into law by President Trump himself.”

“I want to be clear to all LGBTQ+ young people: This news, while upsetting, is not final,” Black said. “And regardless of federal funding shifts, the Trevor Project remains available 24/7 for anyone who needs us, just as we always have.”

The service for LGBTQ youth has received 1.3 million calls, texts, or chats since its debut, with an average of 2,100 contacts per day in February.

“I worry deeply that we will see more LGBTQ young people reach a crisis state and not have anyone there to help them through that,” said Janson Wu, director of advocacy and government affairs at the Trevor Project. “I worry that LGBTQ young people will reach out to 988 and not receive a compassionate and welcoming voice on the other end — and that will only deepen their crisis.”

Under Trump’s HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the agency’s departments and divisions have experienced drastic cuts, with a planned reduction in force of 20,000 full-time employees. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has been sunset and mental health services consolidated into the newly formed Administration for a Healthy America.

The budget document reveals, per Mother Jones, “further sweeping cuts to HHS, including a 40 percent budget cut to the National Institutes of Health; elimination of funding for Head Start, the early childhood education program for low-income families; and a 44 percent funding cut to the Centers for Disease Control, including all the agency’s chronic disease programs.”

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U.S. Supreme Court

Supreme Court hears oral arguments in LGBTQ education case

Mahmoud v. Taylor plaintiffs argue for right to opt-out of LGBTQ inclusive lessons

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U.S. Supreme Court (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday heard oral arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a case about whether Montgomery County, Md., public schools violated the First Amendment rights of parents by not providing them an opportunity to opt their children out of reading storybooks that were part of an LGBTQ-inclusive literacy curriculum.

The school district voted in early 2022 to allow books featuring LGBTQ characters in elementary school language arts classes. When the county announced that parents would not be able to excuse their kids from these lessons, they sued on the grounds that their freedom to exercise the teachings of their Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faiths had been infringed.

The lower federal courts declined to compel the district to temporarily provide advance notice and an opportunity to opt-out of the LGBTQ inclusive curricula, and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that the parents had not shown that exposure to the storybooks compelled them to violate their religion.

“LGBTQ+ stories matter,” Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said in a statement Tuesday. “They matter so students can see themselves and their families in the books they read — so they can know they’re not alone. And they matter for all students who need to learn about the world around them and understand that while we may all be different, we all deserve to be valued and loved.”

She added, “All students lose when we limit what they can learn, what they can read, and what their teachers can say. The Supreme Court should reject this attempt to silence our educators and ban our stories.”

GLAD Law, NCLR, Family Equality, and COLAGE submitted a 40-page amicus brief on April 9, which argued the storybooks “fit squarely” within the district’s language arts curriculum, the petitioners challenging the materials incorrectly characterized them as “specialized curriculum,” and that their request for a “mandated notice-and-opt-out requirement” threatens “to sweep far more broadly.”

Lambda Legal, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, PFLAG, and the National Women’s Law Center announced their submission of a 31-page amicus brief in a press release on April 11.

“All students benefit from a school climate that promotes acceptance and respect,” said Karen Loewy, senior counsel and director of constitutional law practice at Lambda Legal.  “Ensuring that students can see themselves in the curriculum and learn about students who are different is critical for creating a positive school environment. This is particularly crucial for LGBTQ+ students and students with LGBTQ+ family members who already face unique challenges.”

The organizations’ brief cited extensive social science research pointing to the benefits of LGBTQ-inclusive instruction like “age-appropriate storybooks featuring diverse families and identities” benefits all students regardless of their identities.

Also weighing in with amici briefs on behalf of Montgomery County Public Schools were the National Education Association, the ACLU, and the American Psychological Association.

Those writing in support of the parents challenging the district’s policy included the Center for American Liberty, the Manhattan Institute, Parents Defending Education, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Trump-Vance administration’s U.S. Department of Justice, and a coalition of Republican members of Congress.

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