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By Timothy Patrick McCarthy and Dr. Ian Lekus

LGBT Solidarity with Refugees at London's LGBT Pride Parade
LGBT Solidarity with Refugees at London's LGBT Pride Parade.

The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.


On June 20, we mark World Refugee Day, a time for us to reflect on the sobering reality that we are living in a time where there are more displaced peoples than at any time in the modern history of the world. According to the best estimates, 123 million people have been forcibly displaced, including 45 million refugees and asylum-seekers, among them millions of LGBTQI+ people. This crisis is actually a confluence of a number of major human rights challenges: the ominous rise of authoritarian regimes fueled by anti-democratic and illiberal forces; the intensification of nativist and xenophobic rhetoric and policies; and the increasingly coordinated efforts to police, persecute, and punish LGBTQI+ people across the globe.

During times like this, the Carr-Ryan Center’s Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Program partners with our growing network of scholars, practitioners, and human rights defenders to shed light on these crises and challenges. One of our colleagues, Dr. Ian Lekus, Policy & Communications Officer for the Council for Global Equality, has written powerfully in an attempt to connect the dots on these interlocking issues of forced displacement, the plight of refugees and asylum-seekers, and human rights and LGBTQI+ dignity. A distinguished historian of human rights and social movements, Dr. Lekus is a former member of the Harvard faculty (History and Literature, Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, First-Year Seminar Program, and Harvard Extension) and is currently an Academic Affiliate of the Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Program. 

(Timothy Patrick McCarthy)

Here are his words:


 

This , June 20th, LGBTQI+ refugees and asylum seekers are negotiating their way through a world .

Even before January 20th, humanity was already facing the greatest forced displacement crisis in history. The from the UNHCR estimates that more than 123 million people have been forcibly displaced — that is, more than 1 in every 67 human beings on the planet. These include more than 45 million refugees and asylum seekers. With severe long-term, and in some cases, escalating refugee crises in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Myanmar, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, and elsewhere, these trends show little sign of abating. Yet globally, governments are shrinking access to life-saving humanitarian protection programs for those who need them the most.

Precise, reliable data is not available for the number of LGBTQI+ people who have been forcibly displaced by war and conflict, climate disasters, poverty and famine, and state-sanctioned homophobia and transphobia — especially from the 60+ countries that criminalize same-sex relationships. There are multiple reasons for this data gap, including the lack of procedures for tracking sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics in U.N. refugee resettlement databases — let alone storing that information in a secure manner. Then there’s the grave risk posed by self-disclosure when many U.N. and humanitarian organizations’ staff often hold virulently anti-LGBTQI+ attitudes.

But any reasonable estimate puts the figures for LGBTQI+ refugees and asylum seekers well into the millions of people. And LGBTQI+ people living at the intersections of forced displacement and anti-queer politics face a unique set of dangers in their journeys to find safety and security. Most LGBTQI+ refugees are fleeing countries that do not recognize same-sex marriages or parental rights, so queer families risk being torn apart on top of the other dangers they are escaping. For transgender and other genderqueer persons, crossing borders with identity documents that do not match their gender expression is treacherous if not sometimes impossible. often faced these risks.

LGBTQI+ refugees, especially transgender refugees, are subjected to sexual assault and other violence, harassment, and discrimination at alarmingly high rates.

LGBTQI+ refugees are often resettled in transit countries that are as homophobic and transphobic as the countries they have escaped. In refugee camps and facilities — such as those in and in — LGBTQI+ refugees, especially transgender refugees, are subjected to sexual assault and other violence, harassment, and discrimination at alarmingly high rates. And for those refugees and asylum seekers who reached U.S. soil even before January 20th, such dangers persisted: , including physical and verbal attacks, sexual assault and sexual harassment, denial of health care, solitary confinement, and inadequate access to legal representation.

Of course, Donald Trump’s campaign last year to return to the White House leaned hard into fiery anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric. But it is vital to recognize that Trumpism is part of a global phenomenon, where even as the forced displacement crisis shows no signs of abating, right-wing populists are fanning the flames of anti-immigrant xenophobia. U.S., U.K., and E.U. politicians repeatedly invoke specters of invading hordes crossing the Rio Grande, the English Channel, and the Mediterranean to commit violent crime and take the jobs of loyal citizens. Mainstream right-wing politicians regularly mingle with fringe extremists who, alarmed by falling birth rates in the Global North, promote conspiracy theories such as the “great replacement,” wherein Jews, Muslims, and people of color are coordinating to supplant white Christian majorities in North America and Europe.

Hungary, under the authoritarian government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has been perhaps the key nexus of anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQI+, anti-reproductive rights, and pro-natalist politics. From to the , Orbán has repeatedly deployed homophobia and transphobia to chip away at the freedoms of speech and assembly for all Hungarians. In turn, the Prime Minister and his far-right Fidesz party have been the role models for would-be autocrats adopting the same strategy in Slovakia, Bulgaria, Georgia —and in the American far-right movement. This look to Budapest has been explicit from to the

Moreover, Orbán and former President Katalin Novak have been at the front of the narrative around the “demographic crisis” facing the West because of immigration from the Middle East, reproductive rights, and LGBTQI+ rights. to promote parenthood — white parenthood, that is. Meanwhile, the State Department’s of a forthcoming Office of Remigration dedicated to rededicating the State Department’s migration work to “supporting the Administration’s efforts to return illegal aliens to their country of origin or legal status” takes .

So, it should come as little surprise that the global figures at the forefront of nativist, anti-refugee politics are so often the very same activists using homophobia and transphobia as tools to undermine democracy, civil rights, and the rule of law and uphold white supremacy.

In the United States, , Donald Trump and his advisors made it clear that attacks on LGBTQI+ people and on immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers would be the spearhead of their assault on American democracy. Once inauguration, the new Trump Administration wasted not an hour in declaring refugees unwelcome, rolling back LGBTQI+ rights, and attempting to erase transgender Americans from citizenship altogether. Its included the complete suspension of all refugee admissions to the United States (), committing the state to mass detention and deportation, and broadly targeting and scapegoating refugees and asylum seekers. Day One also saw a slew of anti-LGBTQI+, and, specifically, anti-transgender Executive Orders — most notoriously, “,” which invoked the culturally powerful but blatantly false claim that the two sexes, male and female, “are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality” — despite decades and decades of scientific research demonstrating, incontrovertibly, that sex and gender are vastly more complicated than that.

The resettlement freeze and the policies that illegally abandoned U.S. commitments to the right to asylum are already costing LGBTQI+ lives in the service of the Administration’s authoritarian agenda.

LGBTQI+ refugees in and seeking to come to the United States have . Trump Administration policies have put people at risk of persecution due to their LGBTQI+ identity have been functionally trapped in life-threatening conditions and denied access to protections. The resettlement freeze and the policies that illegally abandoned U.S. commitments to the right to asylum are already costing LGBTQI+ lives in the service of the Administration’s authoritarian agenda.

The media has paid some attention to the case of , a talented Venezuelan makeup artist with no criminal record who was in the United States seeking asylum from persecution based on his sexual orientation and political beliefs. Hernández was falsely and “forcibly disappeared,” seized by the Trump administration and flown to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) prison in El Salvador.

Other include:

  • a lesbian couple who fled Afghanistan owing to threats from the Taliban and now face repatriation from Pakistan to their homeland on account of the U.S. resettlement freeze
  • a Somali transgender woman brutally murdered in Kenya while awaiting her U.S. resettlement interview
  • a gay Ugandan refugee scheduled to be relocated to Ohio and reunited with his U.S. long-term partner early in 2025 only to be left in limbo in Kenya because of the suspension of refugee admissions
  • a stateless transgender woman, who had been approved for resettlement to the United States and scheduled for mid-January 2025 travel, now stranded in hiding in Saudi Arabia, her boyfriend imprisoned on account of their relationship
  • a Russian asylum seeker fleeing persecution due to his sexual orientation and political opinion who was illegally denied a U.S. asylum fear screening and unlawfully sent to Panama

 

Given the systemic lack of tracking queer and trans refugees by U.N. and other refugee resettlement agencies, one can easily presume that these cases are just the tip of the iceberg of the LGBTQI+ refugee crisis.

As I write, it is impossible to ignore the immigration justice protests in Los Angeles and the Trump Administration’s threats to expand its against peaceful demonstrators protesting ICE deportations to New York, Chicago, and other cities. World Refugee Day 2025’s theme of certainly speaks to this moment, to the dangers of detention and deportation as well as to those caught in life-threatening situations overseas.

But declaring solidarity with and demanding justice for LGBTQI+ refugees goes beyond concern for the canaries in the coal mine as authoritarians actively seek to explode democracy, however apt the metaphor might be. LGBTQI+ refugees and asylum seekers have the right to freedom from persecution and to live safely, with dignity, and as full participants in their new homeland, and we all must commit ourselves to ensuring those rights are guaranteed.


 

Dr. Lekus’s powerful analysis—including many haunting examples from across the globe—is also a clarion call to action. On this World Refugee Day, may we re-commit ourselves to building a world where human rights for all refugees and asylum-seekers is a top moral and political priority—and where human wrongs are finally a thing of the past. 

(Timothy Patrick McCarthy)

 

Timothy Patrick McCarthy, Faculty Chair, Global LGBTQI+ Program, Carr-Ryan Center

Dr. Ian Lekus, Policy and Communications Officer, Council for Global Equality

Image Credits

Flickr - alisdare1

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