Rexy Amaral, a 19-year-old trans woman living in San Francisco, was undocumented from the time she emigrated from Mexico at age five until she obtained asylum last year. In high school, Amaral often dressed in feminine clothing and wore makeup. Although her school had a large undocumented immigrant population, she was unfairly targeted in and out of school for her gender presentation.
“There were youth dances I went to that ended around midnight, and on my way back home on public transportation I would get stopped by police and asked if I was doing sex work,” Amaral relates. “One time I almost got taken to the police station. I had a bag of condoms and lube in my purse... and they felt like this was stuff that a prostitute carries.”
Transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) young people — particularly youth of color — are vulnerable to poverty, homelessness, profiling by law enforcement, and being pushed into the school-to-prison pipeline. For TGNC youth who are undocumented, the cycle of violence, criminalization, and poverty includes an added danger: deportation. With Donald Trump’s sweeping new immigration directives and bigoted stance toward both immigrant and LGBTQ populations, undocumented TGNC youth currently face pervasive threats to their human rights.
“What Trump would like to see happen is people who are simply accused of a crime placed in immigration detention,” explains Nadia Qurashi, senior staff attorney at the Peter Cicchino Youth Project at the Urban Justice Center, where she provides free legal services to homeless youth, a disproportionate number of whom are undocumented and TGNC. The immigration guidelines the Trump administration released in February could expand the definition of deportable “criminals” to include individuals who have been accused of a crime, whether or not they have been tried and convicted. These guidelines also could give immigration officials new leeway to speed up deportations without court hearings.
For undocumented TGNC youth, particularly trans women and femme individuals, this means that the criminalization they experience could lead to detention and deportation. Forced removal to a country they may not remember would place TGNC youth at risk for even more violent discrimination than they are subjected to in the US. Trump’s policies could also result in the deportation of young people who qualify for legal status: Qurashi says that most of her TGNC undocumented clients are eligible for legal relief based on the trauma they have experienced during their lives.
“I’ve had a number of trans clients get charged with prostitution — like, so many it’s ridiculous. And then the cases just get dismissed,” Qurashi says. “There is a huge issue with our clients being picked up for things like jumping the turnstile if they don’t have enough money to get to a counseling appointment, or not having enough metro fare to get to a shelter, and they don’t want to lose their bed for the night.” LGBTQ youth are twice as likely as their straight peers to be placed in juvenile detention facilities, and over 60 percent of the 300,000 LGBTQ youth arrested or detained annually are Black or Latinx, according to a 2012 report. Being undocumented means not being able to work legally. It usually also means lack of access to health insurance. This can place gender-affirming medical care, along with mental health support, out of reach for many undocumented TGNC youth, who suffer without these services.
“For young trans folks in schools, if they’re being bullied and decide to fight back, the zero-tolerance policies might push them out,” explains Aldo Gallardo, who organizes trans and queer youth in Oakland-area schools. “If a young undocumented person is suspended, or the cops have to be called, it’s not just a mark on your record — you could be deported. So the risks are much higher,” says Gallardo, who also identifies as trans femme and was formerly undocumented.
The dangers facing undocumented TGNC young people are often erased from mainstream conversations on undocumented youth and trans youth, both of which fail to recognize that these identities can overlap. There are around 1.1 million undocumented youth living in the US, but there are no accepted estimates on the number of TGNC undocumented minors. There are at least 267,000 undocumented LGBTQ immigrants in the US, 15,000 to 50,000 of whom identify as transgender. Yet this could be a drastic underrepresentation, given the discrimination experienced by those who are openly trans and/or queer and undocumented.
At least eight trans women of color have already been murdered in 2017. A 2016 Human Rights Watch report found that trans women in immigration detention are often placed in male facilities, where they routinely experience sexual assault, violent harassment, solitary confinement, and denial of medical care such as HIV treatment or hormone replacement therapy.
The marginalization that comes with being trans and undocumented has taken a toll on Amaral: In the past, she has experienced depression and attempted suicide. Since Trump’s election, she is increasingly afraid to be in public spaces or go out with her friends because she feels she could be a target for violence or arrest at any time. “Every day I walk out of the house seeming very confident, but inside I’m always fearing that this will be my last day,” Amaral says. “There’s a constant fear of whether I will live, or whether my friends will live past a certain age.”
Related: Why LGBTQ Latino People Need Protection At an Immigration Rights Rally
