White House
Title 42 to end Thursday
Activists sharply criticize new U.S. asylum rules
A rule that closed the Southern border to most asylum seekers and migrants because of the COVID-19 pandemic will expire on Thursday at 11:59 p.m. ET.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March 2020 implemented Title 42.
The Biden-Harris administration in April 2022 announced it would terminate the previous White House’s policy, but Republican attorneys general from Texas and more than a dozen other states filed a federal lawsuit.
The U.S. Supreme Court last December ruled Title 42 must remain in place. The Biden-Harris administration a few weeks later announced the COVID-19 public health emergency — and Title 42 — would end on Thursday.
“Title 42 exacerbated already dangerous and often deadly situations for LGBTQI people seeking asylum,” San Diego Pride Executive Director Fernando Z. López told the Washington Blade on Tuesday. “It’s tenure caused additional strain on direct services, legal aid and community organizing resources that were felt on both sides of our cross-border region.”
Abdiel Echevarría-Caban, a South Texas-based immigration attorney who the LGBTQ+ Bar in 2021 recognized as one of its 40 best LGBTQ lawyers who are under 40, on Tuesday said Title 42 “needed to end a long time ago, given the country was open to accept travelers through all our airports.”
“It did not make sense to keep enforcing the policy when we have public health safety protocols in place already,” he said. “The use of a public health mechanism to deter asylum seekers at the Southwest border from seeking protection was barbaric, wrong and a misuse of public policy.”
Echevarría-Caban further detailed the impact Title 42 had on LGBTQ and intersex people and other asylum seekers from vulnerable groups that he and other lawyers represented.
“Here, at the Southwest border, we had to request exemptions for people, especially women, children and LGBTQIA people, who were sent back to Mexico, and were exposed to further danger at the streets in Mexico, exposed to cartel violence, extortions, kidnapping and rape,” he said. “Here, in the United States, we have obligations under the Convention Against Torture. The United States was an active party in the development of our current international human rights and refugees system.”
The Associated Press notes the U.S. on Thursday will begin to deny asylum to migrants who don’t seek protection in a country through which they traveled or apply online before they reach the Southern border.
The Department of Homeland Security last fall created a humanitarian parole program for Venezuelans that it expanded to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in January.
A senior administration official on Tuesday said the Biden-Harris administration plans to “expand the family reunification parole programs” to Central American countries that include Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras and to Colombia.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was born in Cuba, on April 27 announced the U.S. will open more than 100 “regional processing centers” throughout the Americas. A senior administration official on Tuesday said they “will facilitate a broad range of legal pathways, lawful pathways to the United States and eventually Canada and Spain as well.”
“Again, our goal is to add these centers to the set of legal pathways that already exist and that the administration has rolled out over the last two years,” said the official.
Another senior administration official said the U.S. has “a robust set of consequences for noncitizens who, despite having these options available to them, continue to cross unlawfully at the border.”
They said the U.S. on Thursday will begin to return them to Mexico under Title 8 after it reached an agreement with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government. (Mexican prosecutors have announced they will charge the director of the country’s National Immigration Institute after a fire at an immigration detention center in Ciudad Juárez, a border city that is across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, killed 40 migrants on March 27. The Associated Press reported a security camera inside the facility recorded two guards who did not try to help the migrants who were inside the cell in which the fire began. The guards, according to the Associated Press, eventually walked away.)
“It also includes the circumvention of lawful pathways rule that we will be posting for public inspection tomorrow (Thursday) morning, and that rule will place significant conditions on asylum eligibility for individuals who do not take advantage of these robust lawful pathways that we have established, who do not schedule their safe and orderly presentation at the border using our CBP One mobile application, and who do not claim asylum in one of the countries that they travel through,” said the official.
The official further noted the U.S. will begin “significantly expanding … our use of expedited removal at the border.”
“This is our traditional Title 8 consequence for individuals who are encountered between ports of entry,” said the official.
TransLatin@ Coalition President Bamby Salcedo on Wednesday told the Blade it is “unfortunate that instead of moving forward, we continue to go backwards.”
“The elimination of Title 42 will impact all of us, but specifically LGBTQ asylum seekers,” said Salcedo. “It is incomprehensible that this administration is taking this step. It’s about moving forward and bettering the lives of people, not taking away the gains that we have earned with hard work, blood and tears.”
Immigration Equality Legal Director Bridget Crawford in a statement also sharply criticized the Biden-Harris administration over its new rules for asylum seekers and migrants once Title 42 ends.
“We are astonished by the administration’s callous disregard of the dangers President Biden’s asylum ban imposes on LGBTQ refugees. In the final rule — scheduled to go into effect once the Title 42 policy is lifted — the administration doesn’t meaningfully address or fix problems with the ban we identified in the notice and comment process. Instead, using circular logic, the administration dismisses our concerns, and doubles down on the illegal implementation of the ban,” said Crawford.
“This ban is a travesty that will cause LGBTQ refugees (and others) with strong, meritorious asylum claims to be sent back to countries where they will be persecuted or killed,” added Crawford. “By implementing this ban, instead of humane solutions that would effectively and compassionately manage the border, President Biden has broken his promise to protect LGBTQ asylum seekers and refugees.”
The Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration works with Jardín de las Mariposas, a shelter for LGBTQ and intersex migrants in the Mexican border city of Tijuana.
ORAM Executive Director Steve Roth on Wednesday said even though his organization “is glad to see an end to Title 42, an unlawful, Trump-era policy, we are deeply concerned about the new barriers to asylum put forward by the Biden administration.”
“President Biden’s restrictions on asylum will have especially harmful and dangerous consequences for vulnerable LGBTIQ refugees and asylum seekers, leaving them in places where their safety will be at risk,” said Roth. “The administration’s new border policies will continue to deny many LGBTIQ refugees their legal right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.”
Echevarría-Caban said the new policies will “pose more obstacles, and contrary to what is expected, it will increase the immigration court backlogs.”
“Our government needs to understand that we cannot use domestic law to weaponize immigration proceedings to avoid compliance with our international obligations or due process,” he told the Blade. “Due process is the core of our legal system, without it, who are we as a nation?”
Vice President Kamala Harris is among the administration officials who have publicly acknowledged violence based on gender identity and sexual orientation is among the factors that prompt LGBTQ and intersex people to leave Guatemala and other Central American countries.
Sources in Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez and other Mexican border cities this week have told the Blade that tens of thousands of migrants have arrived in their respective cities before Title 42 ends. It is not clear how many of them identify as LGBTQ or intersex, but violence in these cities remains commonplace. (The State Department currently advises U.S. citizens not to travel to the Mexico’s Tamaulipas state in which the border cities of Matamoros and Reynosa are located because of “crime and kidnapping.” The State Department also advises U.S. citizens to reconsider travel to Mexico’s Baja California, Sonora and Chihuahua states — which border California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas respectively — because of “crime and kidnapping.”)
Paloma de los Ángeles Villegas Pacheco, director of Trans Igualdad, a transgender rights organization in Ciudad Juárez, on Tuesday told the Blade there “is disinformation” among LGBTQ and intersex migrants who are in the city.
“They think that they are going to be able to access the legal asylum process,” said Villegas. “It will be more difficult for them to enter (the U.S.) once Article 42 ends. The impact will be worse for them.”
Altagracia Tamayo is president of Centro Comunitario de Bienestar Social (COBINA), a group that works with LGBTQ and intersex people and other vulnerable groups in Mexicali, a Mexican border city that borders Calexico, Calif., in California’s Imperial Valley.
Tamayo said roughly a quarter of the 600 migrants who are currently living in the two shelters that COBINA operates are LGBTQ. Tamayo, like Villegas, told the Blade there is “uncertainly” around the end of Title 42.
“The problem is that they think they are going to open the borders … they think they are going to receive them,” said Tamayo. “Article 8 is going to impose many, many restrictions.”
A fire destroyed a COBINA shelter in July 2021. Tamayo told the Blade her organization struggles to support the migrants who live in COBINA’s two remaining shelters.
“The heat is coming,” she said. (Summer temperatures in Mexicali frequently exceed 110°F) “We don’t have enough food to give them three meals a day. It is one of the problems of so much waiting, for so many months. It’s definitely very complicated.”
Mayorkas ‘clear-eyed’ about post-Title 42 challenges
Mayorkas on Wednesday during a press conference in D.C. said his agency is “clear-eyed about the challenges that we are likely to face in the days and weeks ahead, which have the potential to be very difficult.”
“Even after nearly two years of preparation, we expect to see large numbers of encounters at our Southern border in the days and weeks after May 11,” he said.
Mayorkas, nevertheless, stressed the end of Title 42 “does not mean our border is open.” He also reiterated the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policy.
“We will once again process people at our Southern border using our immigration authorities under Title 8 of the United States code,” said Mayorkas. “Our overall approach is to build lawful pathways for people to come to the United States and to impose tougher consequences on those who chose not to use those pathways.”
“We are taking this approach within the constraints of a broken immigration system that Congress has not fixed for more than two decades and without the resources we need, personnel, facilities, transportation and others that we have requested of Congress and that we were not given,” he added.
White House
Trump-appointed judge restores White House TV pool access
Judge called in to question president’s justification of the ban
A federal judge ordered the White House to restore West Wing press credentials to three news organizations after President Donald Trump attempted to bar their access for unfavorable reporting.
Early Thursday morning, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly granted a temporary restraining order brought by POLITICO, CNN, and MS NOW as part of a joint lawsuit. The lawsuit cites the imperative role of a “free press” and ordered the 78 journalists’ credentials returned to the three outlets for at least the next two weeks as litigation plays out.
In the eight-page ruling, the judge goes over a slew of laws that Trump may have violated in banning the three media groups — from stepping on their First Amendment rights to a free press to the Fifth Amendment right to due process.
The judge also questioned Trump’s justification for removing the outlets, originally saying it was a matter of national security.
“The court is skeptical — at least on this record — that defendants’ interest in safeguarding national security is the actual motivation for, or is even advanced by, the revocation of plaintiffs’ hard passes,” Kelly wrote in an 8-page ruling issued just before 1 a.m. ET.
“Nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns. Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ plaintiffs from the White House — instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of plaintiffs’ reporting,” the judge added.
The Washington Blade reached out to the White House press office asking if the administration would file an appeal to keep the journalists out of the West Wing but did not hear back before publication time.
White House
White House press pool pushes back after Trump bars three outlets
As President Trump refuses entry to outlets he deems unreasonable, lawsuits have been filed to regain access to the West Wing
Past the first checkpoint to get into the White House, multiple carts filled with camera equipment sat along a fence. Wagons loaded with tripods, cables, mics, and cameras sat just past where they normally would be working at full power. Today, they were turned off and packed away.
Last week, President Donald Trump decided to bar CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO from the White House following reporting he considers “FAKE NEWS.”
Trump, in a post on Truth Social on Monday morning, described his move as “instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS,” which he said has “grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America.”
“It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control,” he wrote on the social media site he owns. “It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!”
As a result, all of the major television networks that comprise the television press pool — ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox News — suspended their White House TV pool coverage. They decided to no longer send camera crews to cover President Donald Trump’s events.
“The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government,” the five White House TV pool networks said in a joint statement Monday. “No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”
POLITICO, CNN and MS NOW filed a lawsuit Monday to immediately restore access for their reporters, who had their credentials confiscated by the Secret Service.
In the White House, there was a noticeable shift in the atmosphere. The Washington Blade is the only LGBTQ news outlet that is part of the White House Press Pool, and was acting as the primary print pooler as the situation unfolded on Monday.
Whispers about who might be kicked from the press pool next could be heard both in the press area of the West Wing, as well as outside the part of the White House dedicated to filming the president’s office. The area where TV stations normally film their live shots of the White House while reporting looked less busy than a normal Monday — especially as the president made his way to New York City ahead of the UN General Assembly meeting this week.
CNN’s outdoor filming area, which is staffed nearly at all times, sat dark with a green cover over the space that normally houses its cameras and political reporters like Kaitlan Collins.
There were small signs of solidarity from other outlets in the press office. A sign that has hung outside one of the news offices in the West Wing was updated. It originally read, “WE STAND WITH AP” following President Trump’s first attempt at removing a news outlet he deemed unfavorable. It now includes “I STAND WITH AP CNN MSNOW POLITICO.”
The change could also be felt as the press pool attempted to cover the president.
There was a ribbon cutting in honor of the $6 million helipad installed at Trump’s behest — which had nearly no audio as a result of fewer microphones in the space following the outlets’ removal on Monday afternoon, and partly because of the loud sound of Marine One.
Vice President JD Vance defended Trump when asked about the changes to TV access at the White House, standing with the president despite this likely being a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free and fair press.
“He’s not banning media outlets. What he’s doing is saying we’re not going to give you special access to the White House if you engage in what is effectively propaganda,” Vance said, alleging that 92% of the stories from CNN, MS NOW and Politico about Trump are “negative.”
“That’s not representative of the American people. It’s not representative of public opinion,” Vance said.
He pushed back on the notion that this is a hindrance on free speech — claiming access to the president through White House visitation is a privilege — a privilege that in this administration, at least until courts weigh in, could change the landscape of the American media system.
“It’s about basic fairness. They can still report. They still have the access to free speech. They’re just not going to get an office in the White House anymore,” Vance said.
Jacqui Heinrich, the White House Correspondents Association President condemned the president’s actions in restricting media access in a statement sent to WHCA members on Saturday.
“Today’s action revoking access for journalists from CNN, POLITICO, and MSNOW violates the First Amendment. The implications extend beyond these organizations: a standard used to exclude one news outlet because of its coverage could be applied to any outlet in the future.
“The American people, through a free and independent press, must be able to scrutinize those elected to power, regardless of whether government officials view it favorably. That’s why courts have repeatedly held that once the White House provides access to journalists, it cannot deny that access arbitrarily or based on the content of their reporting. The WHCA calls on the administration to immediately restore our colleagues’ access.”
White House
Trump-Vance administration’s LGBTQ brain drain: what you need to know
Several high profile figures have left government since January 2025
Uncloseted Media published this article on Aug. 21.
By SPENCER MACNAUGHTON and HOPE PISONI | Since President Donald Trump regained office in January 2025, he and his administration have waged an all-out war against the LGBTQ community.
This has led queer Americans to move to other countries at unprecedented rates — Rainbow Railroad, a Canadian nonprofit that supports LGBTQ asylum seekers, reported receiving a huge increase in inquiries from the U.S. last year.
The same pattern is playing out within the government. And it’s leading to a brain drain of competent queer employees and allies who are either resigning or being fired, often because of their LGBTQ identity or their belief that queer people deserve basic human rights.
Here are six examples of federal workers who had a messy exit from Trump 2.0:
Demetre Daskalakis
- WHAT HE DID: Dr. Daskalakis is one of the foremost LGBTQ health professionals in the U.S. Under Trump’s first term, he was appointed director of the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Under Biden, he also served as the deputy response coordinator for mpox at the White House.
- WHAT HAPPENED: While he continued a lot of this work under Trump 2.0, he didn’t last long. In August 2025, he resigned from the CDC, writing in his resignation letter that he was “unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.”
- BOTTOM LINE: I recently interviewed Daskalakis, where he told me that leadership from RFK Jr.’s Health and Human Services Department justified HIV cuts by saying the virus is “just too woke.”
Julia Curlee
- WHAT SHE DID: Julia Curlee worked in intelligence for nearly two decades between the CIA and the National Security Council. Earlier this week, she wrote an article in The Atlantic explaining how she had served as Mike Pence’s daily briefer and the NSC’s director for intelligence programs. During Trump 1.0, she briefed the president on Air Force One.
- WHAT HAPPENED: Curlee told CNN this week that in Trump’s second term, her treatment by the federal government transformed. She was no longer allowed to use the women’s bathroom on federal property and had to leave her workplace to relieve herself. Her passport was also reissued to read “male,” which led to complications when traveling abroad. In March 2025, less than 70 days into Trump’s second term, Curlee says she received a call while at a rib joint in Virginia with her family informing her that her White House tour was over and that they couldn’t tell her why. She continued to work for the CIA for some months, but she later resigned.
- BOTTOM LINE: Curlee wrote that moments after she learned she was fired from the White House, she saw a post from right-wing political activist Laura Loomer that read “A transgender, Biden holdover who hates President Trump is still working in the NSC intel office. I’m told there are several NSC staffers who have complained that this trans Biden holdover hasn’t been fired yet, but nothing is being done about it.”
Marc Seawright
- WHAT HE DID: Marc Seawright worked for more than eight years at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Most recently, he served as the EEOC’s director of information governance and strategy, where he oversaw tech policy to help combat workplace harassment and discrimination.
- WHAT HAPPENED: During Trump 2.0, Seawright was ordered to develop technology that would erase any mention of LGBTQ identities from EEOC outreach materials. “[My expertise] was being leveraged to perpetuate discrimination against people like me,” he told the Associated Press. In that article, Seawright and other transgender and gender nonconforming federal employees described their “fear, grief, frustration, and distress working for the federal government at a time when it rejects them — often with no clear path for recourse or support.”
- BOTTOM LINE: Seawright quit in June, citing a hostile work environment. “It became overwhelming. It felt insurmountable,” he told the AP. He has now hired lawyers at Katz Banks Kumin and has filed a discrimination complaint.
David Maltinsky
- WHAT HE DID: Until 2025, Maltinsky worked for more than 16 years at the FBI as an intelligence specialist. In 2025, he was training to become a special agent, but three weeks ahead of graduation, he was fired.
- WHAT HAPPENED: On Oct. 1, he was delivered a letter from FBI Director Kash Patel informing him that he was being fired for an “inappropriate display of political signage.” The signage in question, according to Maltinsky, was a Pride flag displayed in his work station at a previous post in Los Angeles. The flag had been given to him by the FBI’s LA Field Office, and Maltinsky says he had been told by multiple supervisors that displaying it would not be a violation.
- BOTTOM LINE: Maltinsky is currently suing the FBI and the Department of Justice, arguing that his firing constituted unlawful discrimination.
Mary Brinkmeyer
- WHAT SHE DID: Brinkmeyer had been working as a psychologist for the Department of Veterans Affairs since 2008. She held multiple leadership roles, including the LGBTQ veteran care coordinator at the Hampton VA Medical Center. She established the first military support group for trans servicemembers and was awarded Navy Psychology Civilian Psychologist of the Year in 2016.
- WHAT HAPPENED: Following an early Trump executive order directing the federal government to purge any practices promoting “gender ideology,” Brinkmeyer says staff at her workplace were told to remove all LGBTQ-affirming materials from both public and private areas, as well as to identify “anything in medical records, training materials, or patient resources that could be considered ‘gender ideology.’” When she refused to comply and confronted her supervisor, she says her concerns were dismissed.
- BOTTOM LINE: Brinkmeyer resigned in February 2025, stating that she “didn’t want to be complicit in something that I knew was wrong.”
Amy Paris
- WHAT SHE DID: Paris was the second-highest ranking trans woman in the federal government, serving as a deputy digital services lead in the HHS Department, where she oversaw the safety of organ donations. Prior to that, she worked in a number of tech-related roles across the federal government since the Bush administration. She helped create cross-agency spending trackers, streamlined unemployment insurance during the pandemic and implemented trans-inclusive policies like gender-neutral passports.
- WHAT HAPPENED: Paris was fired as part of a string of mass layoffs across the federal government in February 2025. While the HHS did not publicly comment on why she was fired, Paris says she was told it was because of her performance, despite the fact that she got a 4.75 out of five on her last performance review and was praised for her work by multiple Biden administration officials.
- BOTTOM LINE: Paris told the 19th she suspected her firing was politically motivated, saying the Trump administration is “trying to sow discord and disrupt confidence in the workings of the federal government.”
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