World
Shelters for LGBTQ asylum seekers on Mexico-US border ‘overwhelmed’
Nearly 50 people living at Jardín de las Mariposas in Tijuana
Editor’s note: International News Editor Michael K. Lavers was on assignment for the Washington Blade in Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador from July 11-25.
TIJUANA, Mexico — Marvin is a 23-year-old gay man from Dulce Nombre, a municipality in Honduras’ Copán department.
He left Honduras with a migrant caravan on Jan. 13, 2020, in order to escape the discrimination he said he would have suffered if his family and neighbors knew he is gay. Marvin spent eight months in the custody of Mexican immigration officials until they released him last November.
He was in the Mexican border city of Tijuana in April when a cousin told him his younger brother had been murdered. Marvin, who is currently living at Jardín de las Mariposas, a shelter for LGBTQ asylum seekers in Tijuana, began to sob when the Blade saw a picture of his brother’s body in the morgue in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’ second-largest city.
“He didn’t mess with anyone,” said Marvin.
Marvin is one of 47 people who were living at Jardín de las Mariposas when the Blade visited it on July 12. The shelter’s maximum capacity is 40.
A lesbian woman who asked the Blade not to publish her name said she fled El Salvador in January after MS-13 gang members threatened to kill her because she could not pay them the money they demanded from her. She said members of 18th Street, another gang, attacked her son after he refused to sell drugs.
“They hit him very hard; very, very hard,” the lesbian woman told the Blade at Jardín de las Mariposas, speaking through tears.
Olvin, a 22-year-old gay man from El Progreso, a city in Honduras’ Yoro department, left the country in January.
He said he and his partner of three years lived together in Tapachula, a city in Mexico’s Chiapas state that is close to the country’s border with Guatemala, for several months. Olvin said gang members threatened them and they suffered discrimination because of their sexual orientation.
Olvin told the Blade he rescued his partner from an apartment building one night after he refused to sell drugs, and they ran to a nearby park. Olvin, who was crying when he spoke with the Blade at Jardín de las Mariposas, said he left Tapachula a few days later without his partner.
Olvin arrived at the shelter a few hours before the Blade visited. He said he wants to ask for asylum in the U.S.
“I want to live in a safe place,” said Olvin.
Kelly West is a transgender woman who fled discrimination and persecution she said she suffered in Jamaica.
She flew to Panama City and then to Mexican city of Guadalajara before she arrived in Tijuana on June 16. West said she and a group of eight other LGBTQ asylum seekers tried to “run over the line at the border” between Mexico and the U.S., but Mexican police stopped them.
“We had to run for our lives,” West told the Blade at Jardín de las Mariposas. “I even ran without my shoes. I jumped over a bridge.”
She said she and three of the other asylum seekers with whom she tried to enter the U.S. went to another shelter for LGBTQ asylum seekers in Tijuana, but it was full. West said the shelter referred them to Jardín de las Mariposas.
“I really like it here,” she told the Blade. “Here I can be who I want, I can dress how I want to. I can wear my heels, I can wear my hair. I can just be feminine everyday.”
Jaime Marín, who runs Jardín de las Mariposas with his mother, Yolanda Rocha, noted some residents were sleeping in a tent in the backyard because the shelter is over capacity.
“We’re overpopulated with a lot of residents,” Marín told the Blade.
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.
Vice President Kamala Harris and other administration officials have publicly acknowledged that violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity is one of the “root causes” of migration from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. The White House has told migrants not to travel to the U.S.-Mexico border, but Marín said the number of people who have traveled to Tijuana since President Biden took office has increased dramatically.
The previous White House forced tens of thousands of asylum seekers to pursue their cases in Mexico under its Migrant Protection Protocols program. The Biden administration on June 1 officially ended MPP.
“The process has been easier, which means they’re no longer staying months or years,” Marín told the Blade. “They submit their application, let’s say today, and they get a response for a date in two weeks. They’re basically in the United States within a month.”
Marvin hopes to use the picture of his brother’s body in the morgue and Honduran newspaper articles about his murder as evidence to support his asylum case. Marvin, however, has yet to find someone to sponsor him.
“My goal … is to go to the United States,” he said.
Marín told the Blade the two other shelters for LGBTQ asylum seekers in Tijuana are also at maximum capacity. Marín said U.S. immigration officials are also “overwhelmed” with new asylum applications.
“It might take a little bit longer than a month because of the number of people that are basically coming and we just have to increase the work we do as well because we are getting a lot more work too,” he told the Blade. “We are overwhelmed as well.”
Fire destroyed lesbian-run Mexicali migrant shelter on July 9
Centro Comunitario de Bienestar Social (COBINA) in Mexicali, a border city that is roughly 2 1/2 hours east of Tijuana, is a group that serves LGBTQ people and other vulnerable groups.
It runs three migrant shelters in the city, which borders Calexico, Calif., in California’s Imperial Valley. An electrical fire that destroyed COBINA’s Refugio del Migrante on July 9 displaced the 152 migrants from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and other countries who were living there.
Some of the shelter’s residents were living in COBINA’s offices when the Blade visited them on July 12.
“We need resources to rebuild the shelter, to buy wood, to buy everything that is needed,” COBINA President Altagracia Tamayo told the Blade.
The Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration has raised $2,600 for COBINA to use to buy clothes, food and diapers for the displaced migrants and their children. The ORAM funds will also allow COBINA to buy portable air conditioning units. (The temperature in Mexicali was 108 degrees when the Blade reported from there.)
Tamayo told the Blade that COBINA has been working with the U.N. Refugee Agency and the International Organization for Migration to assist the displaced migrants.
Jardín de las Mariposas moved into a new house in May. It is less than four miles from El Chaparral, the main port of entry between Tijuana and San Diego.
Alight, formerly known as the American Refugee Agency, recently worked with ORAM to install security cameras and purchase new furniture for Jardín de las Mariposas. They also painted the shelter and a mural, installed solar heaters on the roof, planted plants and renovated the backyard.
This work is part of Alight’s “A Little Piece of Home” initiative that works to improve shelters for migrants and refugees along the border.
“This is beautiful because they are helping us and not letting us down,” Marín told the Blade. “They’re basically giving us hope to continue this fight that we have.”
Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev on Tuesday signed a bill that will ban so-called LGBTQ propaganda in the country.
Members of Kazakhstan’s lower house of parliament last month unanimously approved the measure that would ban “‘LGBT propaganda’ online or in the media” with “fines for violators and up to 10 days in jail for repeat offenders.” The Kazakh Senate on Dec. 18 approved the bill.
Kazakhstan is a predominantly Muslim former Soviet republic in Central Asia that borders Russia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and China. Russia, Georgia, and Hungary are among the other countries with anti-LGBTQ propaganda laws.
India
Few transgender people benefit from India’s low-income housing program
Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana launched in 2015
The Indian government on Dec. 15 informed parliament that only one transgender person in Jammu and Kashmir has been recorded as a beneficiary under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana since the housing program was launched a decade ago.
PMAY is a federal government program aimed at expanding access to affordable housing for low- and middle-income households, including through credit-linked subsidies. The parliamentary disclosure indicates that trans beneficiaries have been virtually absent from the program’s records in the union territory, despite official guidelines listing trans people as a priority category.
In a written reply to a question in the upper house of parliament, known as the Rajya Sabha, the Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry said Jammu and Kashmir recorded zero trans beneficiaries under the program in each financial year from 2020–2021 through 2025–2026, with the cumulative total since inception remaining at one.
The Indian government launched the program on June 25, 2015, and the Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry implemented it.
The parliamentary reply came in response to a question on whether trans people are being included under the housing scheme and what steps have been taken to address barriers to access. The ministry said both PMAY and its successor, PMAY 2.0, are demand-driven programs, with responsibility for identifying and selecting beneficiaries resting with state and regional governments.
The ministry said the program lists trans people as a priority group, alongside widows, single women, people with disabilities, senior citizens, and other socially disadvantaged categories. It added that actual implementation depends on housing proposals and beneficiary lists submitted by state and regional governments.
According to figures the Indian government cited, a total of 809 trans beneficiaries have been recorded under PMAY and its successor, PMAY 2.0, since the programs were launched, with the vast majority concentrated in a small number of states. The southern state of Tamil Nadu accounts for 222 beneficiaries, followed by Andhra Pradesh with 186, and Odisha with 101. By contrast, several other states and federally administered regions, including Jammu and Kashmir, have reported either negligible or no coverage. India is administratively divided into 28 states and eight federally governed territories.
According to India’s 2011 national Census, Jammu and Kashmir recorded 4,137 trans residents. The same census counted 487,803 trans people nationwide, providing the most recent official population baseline for the community in India.
The ministry also said it has not conducted a specific survey to assess barriers faced by trans communities in accessing the scheme’s benefits. Instead, it said lessons from earlier implementation phases informed the design of the second phase of the program, launched on Sept. 1, 2024, which aims to support an additional 10 million urban beneficiaries over the next five years.
The parliamentary reply reveals an even more severe gap in Ladakh, India’s northernmost federally governed territory bordering China and Pakistan-administered areas and considered strategically critical to national security.
Official records show that Ladakh has not reported a single trans beneficiary under the housing scheme, either in recent years or cumulatively since the program began, with zero coverage recorded across all financial years listed in the Annexure. By comparison, Ladakh’s trans population stands at six, according to a written submission made to the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir in 2024.
Despite trans people being listed as a priority group in the scheme’s guidelines, the federal government said that as of November 2025 it had sanctioned more than 12.2 million homes nationwide under both versions of the program, with over 9.6 million homes completed and delivered. At the same time, data from Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, and several other regions show little to no recorded housing uptake by trans beneficiaries.
Speaking with the Washington Blade, Meera Parida, a trans activist, former member of the National Council for Transgender Persons in India’s eastern zone, and a former state advisor under the housing and urban development department, said the 2011 Census does not reflect the full size of India’s trans population, noting that public recognition and self-identification were far more limited at the time. She pointed to later government data collection efforts, including the National Portal for Transgender Persons that the Social Justice and Empowerment Ministry launched in 2020, as evidence that official counts have expanded beyond what was captured in the last Census.
“I am surprised that around the country only over 800 people benefited from the scheme, because most of the transgender population is from socially backward classes,” said Parida. “So they do not have a house and no family. Five years have passed since the NALSA judgment and the Transgender Protection Act; even after all these, if only over 800 transgender persons got home, that is a sad situation.”
Parida said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has publicly positioned trans people’s welfare as a priority, but argued that the issue requires greater attention at the administrative level. She said the prime minister’s office should issue clear directions to all relevant departments to ensure trans people receive housing support and that implementation moves more quickly.
“There is still widespread discrimination and stigma against the community. Many transgender people are afraid to speak openly, which is why this issue continues to persist,” Parida said. “If stigma and discrimination are not addressed seriously, the marginalized community will remain invisible and reluctant to come forward. In that situation, the government will also be limited in what it can do. State governments should work with activists and community organizations to build accurate data. The government has decided to resume the Census in 2026, but the enumerators who go door to door must be sensitized to engage respectfully with the transgender community. The government should also improve awareness of housing schemes, because many people simply do not know they exist. A single-window system is needed.”
A Wider Bridge on Friday announced it will shut down at the end of the month.
The group that “mobilizes the LGBTQ community to fight antisemitism and support Israel and its LGBTQ community” in a letter to supporters said financial challenges prompted the decision.
“After 15 years of building bridges between LGBTQ communities in North America and Israel, A Wider Bridge has made the difficult decision to wind down operations as of Dec. 31, 2025,” it reads.
“This decision comes after challenging financial realities despite our best efforts to secure sustainable funding. We deeply appreciate our supporters and partners who made this work possible.”
Arthur Slepian founded A Wider Bridge in 2010.
The organization in 2016 organized a reception at the National LGBTQ Task Force’s Creating Change Conference in Chicago that was to have featured to Israeli activists. More than 200 people who protested against A Wider Bridge forced the event’s cancellation.
A Wider Bridge in 2024 urged the Capital Pride Alliance and other Pride organizers to ensure Jewish people can safely participate in their events in response to an increase in antisemitic attacks after Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported authorities in Vermont late last year charged Ethan Felson, who was A Wider Bridge’s then-executive director, with lewd and lascivious conduct after alleged sexual misconduct against a museum employee. Rabbi Denise Eger succeeded Felson as A Wider Bridge’s interim executive director.
A Wider Bridge in June honored U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) at its Pride event that took place at the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C. The event took place 15 days after a gunman killed two Israeli Embassy employees — Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim — as they were leaving an event at the museum.
“Though we are winding down, this is not a time to back down. We recognize the deep importance of our mission and work amid attacks on Jewish people and LGBTQ people – and LGBTQ Jews at the intersection,” said A Wider Bridge in its letter. “Our board members remain committed to showing up in their individual capacities to represent queer Jews across diverse spaces — and we know our partners and supporters will continue to do the same.”
Editor’s note: Washington Blade International News Editor Michael K. Lavers traveled to Israel and Palestine with A Wider Bridge in 2016.
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