Mexico
Mexico City hosts LGBTQ, intersex rights conference
LGBTQ+ Victory Institute co-organized 3-day event

Editor’s note: International News Editor Michael K. Lavers was on assignment in Mexico City from July 17-23.
MEXICO CITY — More than 400 people from around the world attended an LGBTQ and intersex rights conference that took place last week in Mexico City.
Jessica Stern, the special U.S. envoy for the promotion of LGBTQ and intersex rights, and Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the independent U.N. expert on LGBTQ and intersex issues, are among those who spoke at the LGBTI Political Leaders from the Americas and the Caribbean Conference that the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute co-sponsored. Maryland state Del. Gabriel Acevero (D-Montgomery County), Massachusetts state Rep. Jack Lewis, Brazilian Congresswomen Erika Hilton and Duda Salabert, Mexican Congresswoman Salma Luévano, Venezuelan National Assemblywoman Tamara Adrián, former Colombian Congressman Mauricio Toro, former Peruvian Congressman Alberto de Belaunde, Eastern Caribbean Alliance for Diversity and Equality Executive Director Kenita Placide and Fundación Triángulo (Spain) President José María Núñez Blanco are among those who also participated.
Victory Institute spokesperson Pita Juárez noted to the Washington Blade the 438 people who attended the conference came from the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Afghanistan, China, Panama, Paraguay, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and Honduras.
The following groups from across the region co-organized the conference along with the Victory Institute.
• Yaaj México
• Caribe Afirmativo (Colombia)
• Diversidad Dominicana (Dominican Republic)
• Somos CDC (Honduras)
• Promsex (Peru)
• VoteLGBT+ (Brazil)
Stern in her speech at the conference on July 20 noted the U.S. supported the conference and helped organizers cover some attendees’ transportation costs.
‘Fight for global equality is more important than ever’
The conference took place against the backdrop of the passage of anti-LGBTQ laws in several U.S. states and in countries around the world and persistent violence based on gender identity and sexual orientation throughout Latin America.
Cubans last September approved a new family code that extended marriage and adoption rights to same-sex couples. (Brenda Díaz, a transgender woman with HIV who participated in an anti-government protest in the country’s Artemisa province on July 11, 2021, is serving a 14-year prison sentence.) Barbados, St. Kitts and Nevis and Antigua and Barbuda over the last year have decriminalized consensual same-sex sexual relations.
“Our fight for global equality is more important than ever,” said Victory Institute President Annise Parker on July 20 when she opened the conference. “We have always known that we have had much farther to go, but we are experiencing a backlash across the globe.”
“In the United States a record number of anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced and passed last year,” she noted. “LGBTQ+ lawmakers like (Oklahoma state Rep.) Mauree Turner and (Montana state Rep.) Zooey Zephyr were censured and expelled from their offices in the United States, but hate has no borders.”
Parker in her speech said “efforts to discriminate against trans people are increasing” in the U.K. and “we’ve seen an uptick in identity-based harassment” in Latin America. Parker also noted Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in May signed his country’s Anti-Homosexuality that contains a death penalty provision for “aggravated homosexuality.”
“This is a moment of alarm; it is also a rallying cry,” said Parker. “The best way to push back is to put LGBTQI+ people into those halls and offices to stand up and speak for us. They’re our anecdotes to hate.”
Parker in her speech also noted LGBTQ and intersex rights advances in the Americas over the last year. They include the election of Hilton and Dudabert, who are both trans, to the Brazilian Congress last October, the five LGBTQ people and a nonbinary person who won their respective races for the Colombian House of Representatives in May 2022 and the Mexican Senate’s vote to ban so-called conversion therapy in the country.
“We can make progress,” said Parker.
Mexico
Trump executive orders leave LGBTQ migrants, asylum seekers in limbo
Suspension of US foreign aid may force shelters to close

MEXICALI, Mexico — Marlon, a 35-year-old man from Guatemala, used the CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection) One app to schedule an appointment that would have allowed him to enter the U.S. at a port of entry.
His CBP One appointment was at 1 p.m. PT (4 p.m. ET) on Jan. 21 in the Mexican city of Tijuana that borders San Diego. Marlon at around 11 a.m. PT (2 p.m. ET) on Jan. 20 learned his appointment had been cancelled.
President Donald Trump took office less than two hours earlier.
“We’re stuck,” Marlon told the Washington Blade on Jan. 31 during an interview at Posada del Migrante, a migrant shelter in the Mexican border city of Mexicali that Centro Comunitario de Bienestar (COBINA), a group that serves LGBTQ people and other vulnerable groups, runs.

The Trump-Vance administration’s immigration policies have left Marlon and many other migrants and asylum seekers — LGBTQ and otherwise — in limbo.
Daniela is a 20-year-old transgender woman from Tijuana who has lived at Jardín de las Mariposas, a shelter for LGBTQ migrants and asylum seekers in the city’s Obrera neighborhood, for a month. Jardín de las Mariposas is roughly six miles south of the Mexico-U.S. border.
She told the Blade on Jan. 29 during an interview that she was raped in Hermosillo, the capital of Mexico’s Sonora state, four months ago. Daniela said her roommate and five other people later tried to kill her when they “were drunk and on drugs.”
Daniela, like Marlon, had a CBP One appointment, but it was cancelled once Trump took office.
“I am completely alone both in Tijuana and elsewhere,” said Daniela. “I think the United States is a better option to be able to start over.”
Stephanie, a 25-year-old from El Paraíso, Honduras who identifies as a lesbian, arrived in Tijuana last July and lives at Jardín de las Mariposas.
She told the Blade her family is “very religious,” and she is the “only one in my family who is a member of the (LGBTQ) community.” Stephanie said a cousin in Louisiana agreed to allow her to live with her once she entered in the U.S., but she refused once she saw she had cut her hair.
“I felt a bit of freedom once I arrived here in Mexico … and I decided to cut my hair because it was very long,” recalled Stephanie. “One day she did a video call and she saw my short hair and she was like I cannot receive you; I cannot receive you because what example are you going to be to my son.”
Trump, in addition to shutting down the CBP One app on Jan. 20, issued several immigration-specific executive orders after his inauguration. They include:
• Declaring a national emergency on the Southern border
• Suspending the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program
• Ending birthright citizenship under the 14th amendment. (U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, who Ronald Reagan appointed, in a Jan. 23 ruling that temporarily blocked the directive described it as “blatantly unconstitutional.”)
Trump has reinstated the Migrant Protection Protocols program, also known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy that forced asylum seekers to pursue their cases in Mexico.
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce on Tuesday said Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele during his meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio “agreed to take back all Salvadoran MS-13 gang members who are in the United States unlawfully,” and “promised to accept and incarcerate violent illegal immigrants, including members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, but also criminal illegal migrants from any country.” The Department of Homeland Security in a press release notes Tren de Aragua members were on the first U.S. military “flight of criminal aliens” that arrived at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba on Tuesday.
Jardín de Las Mariposas Director Jamie Marín on Jan. 29 told the Blade that Trump’s policies have sparked “a lot of fear.”
She said some of the shelter’s residents who had their CBP One appointments cancelled have either returned to their countries of origin or have found another way to enter the U.S., including with the help of smugglers who are known as “coyotes” in Mexican Spanish. Marín said Jardín de las Mariposas is working with those who have decided to stay in Tijuana to help them secure identity documents and employment.
“Our goal was to be a temporary shelter to move to the United States,” she told the Blade. “Now it’s almost becoming like we’re going to become a permanent shelter until we find another solution for them.”

Susy Barrales is president of Casita de Unión Trans, a trans support group that she founded in Tijuana in 2019 after she was deported from the U.S.
She told the Blade during a Jan. 30 interview at her office, which is a few blocks from the border, that two migrants who the U.S. deported arrived at Casa de Unión Trans the day before without medications. Barrales, like Marín, said the Trump’s immigration policies have sparked concern in Tijuana.
“He is doing this political campaign,” said Barrales in response to the Blade’s question about Trump’s policies. “I think it is something political, a political strategy that he wants to do, as a way to slow down immigration. This is why he makes these types of racist comments against migrants and against the community.”
Situation along Mexico-US border is ‘tense’
The Trump-Vance administration’s decision to suspend nearly all U.S. foreign aid spending for at least 90 days has had a direct impact on Mexican organizations that serve LGBTQ migrants and asylum seekers.
Casa Frida works with upwards of 300 LGBTQ asylum seekers and migrants in Mexico City and in the cities of Monterrey and Tapachula. Sixty percent of Casa Frida’s annual budget comes from U.S. government grants — specifically from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the State Department, and its Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
Casa Frida Director Raúl Caporal on Monday told the Blade the U.S. on Jan. 24 suspended funding for five of his organization’s initiatives.
A poster inside COBINA’s offices on Jan. 31 contained a QR code that brought migrants to a WhatsApp page that had information about how they could “migrate informed and legally.” The State Department partnered with Partners of the Americas, a Washington-based NGO, on the initiative.
Maky Pollorena, a Mexicali-based activist who volunteers with COBINA, told the Blade the WhatsApp page stopped providing information on Jan. 24. Pollorena also said COBINA and the majority of migrant shelters in Mexico’s Baja California state of which Mexicali is the capital have lost between 50 and 70 percent of their funding.
“All of us who are in Baja California’s border strip are tense,” said COBINA President Altagracia Tamayo.

Marín noted Jardín de las Mariposas’ funding does not come from the U.S. government, but rather from the Transgender Law Center and other NGOs that include AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Baja California Gov. Marina del Pilar Ávila’s administration donated the building in which Jardín de las Mariposas is located. The International Organization for Migration, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and the Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration are also support Jardín de las Mariposas.
Despite this lack of dependence upon U.S. government funding, Marín said the Trump-Vance administration’s policies could prove deadly.
“These decisions from the Trump administration are going to cost a lot of lives for the LGBT community, not only here,” she said. “It’s also going to cost a lot of lives in the United States.”
Mexico
Mexican group that serves LGBTQ migrants may close without US funding
60 percent of Casa Frida’s annual budget comes from Washington

Editor’s note: International News Editor Michael K. Lavers is on assignment in Mexico to cover the impact that President Donald Trump’s immigration policies are having on LGBTQ migrants and asylum seekers.
MEXICO CITY — The Trump-Vance administration’s decision to freeze nearly all U.S. foreign aid spending for at least 90 days could force a Mexican organization that serves LGBTQ migrants and asylum seekers to close.
Casa Frida works with upwards of 300 LGBTQ asylum seekers and migrants in Mexico City and in the cities of Monterrey and Tapachula.
Casa Frida Director Raúl Caporal on Monday told the Washington Blade during an interview at his Mexico City office that 60 percent of his organization’s annual budget comes from U.S. government grants — specifically from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the State Department, and its Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
Caporal said the U.S. on Jan. 24 suspended funding for five Casa Frida initiatives that specifically focused on “organizational strengthening, humanitarian assistance, financial inclusion, digital security” and fighting human trafficking.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the same day directed State Department personnel to stop nearly all U.S. foreign aid spending for 90 days in response to an executive order that Trump signed on Jan. 20. Rubio last week issued a waiver that allows the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and other “life-saving humanitarian assistance” programs to continue to operate during the funding freeze.
“All of these (Casa Frida) services are now extremely limited and compromised because the suspension was immediate,” Caporal told the Blade.
He said Casa Frida has already laid off several staffers. Caporal also told the Blade the U.S. funds that remain in Casa Frida’s bank account may have to be returned to Washington.
“That implies many problems,” said Caporal. “It’s not only the continuity of our services, but it also puts the organization’s future at risk.”
Casa Frida has already laid off several staffers. Caporal told the Blade that he and his colleagues are working with the European Union, foreign governments, local officials, and private donors to find additional funding sources.

The waiver that Rubio issued notes it does not apply to “activities that involve abortions, family planning conferences” and “gender or DEI ideology programs, transgender surgeries, or other non-life saving assistance.”
Caporal said there is a chance the White House could extend the funding freeze in order to “review which international cooperation projects align or coincide with the current administration’s political interests.”
“We are quite certain that much of this aid is going to return,” he said. “But (Trump) since the campaign has made it very clear that nothing, not a single dollar for the LGBT community, or for sexual rights, reproductive rights, women, migrants.”
“It is therefore very possible that projects that have more to do with eliminating inequality gaps, poverty, urban development, etc., will return,” added Caporal. “But we are not waiting for these projects to be reactivated.”
Casa Frida is among the global LGBTQ organizations dependent upon U.S. support that have been left scrambling. The Blade is in touch with several of them that may have to curtail programming or even close if they cannot secure alternate funding sources.
The Blade will update this story.
Mexico
VIDEO: Blade visits Mexico-US border
Trump policies put LGBTQ migrants, asylum seekers at risk

TIJUANA, Mexico — The Washington Blade on Jan. 29 visited the Mexico-U.S. border in the Mexican border city of Tijuana.
(Washington Blade video by Michael K. Lavers)
The Blade since Jan. 28 has been on assignment in Mexico to cover the impact that President Donald Trump’s immigration policies are having on LGBTQ migrants and asylum seekers. The Blade will remain on assignment in the country and in El Salvador through Feb. 8.
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