Despite the politicization of the nation’s asylum process and the threat of deportation, many immigrants in the United States are still seeking and applying for asylum, but the already difficult task can be especially daunting for LGBTQ asylum seekers without access to legal services.
The Caribbean Equality Project (CEP), which has a deep understanding of the unique challenges facing LGBTQ+ and immigrant identities in primarily Black and Caribbean neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, is advocating for a distinct funding measure of an annual $15 million to provide legal assistance specifically for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers, among other things.
Last year, under the banner of the New York City Trans & Queer Coalition (NYCTQC), they led a historic campaign that secured about $13 million in funding for transgender, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary (TGNCNB) New Yorkers, including the nation’s first gender-affirming care for youth fund.
“We were founded in 2015, in response to anti-LGBTQ hate violence in Richmond Hill, Queens, and a decade later, we’re still responding to violence. It looks differently today,” said CEP Founder & Executive Director Mohamed Q. Amin. “We are responding to federal and state systematic violence, trans erasure, and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] ICE enforcement that’s impacting our Afro and Indo-Caribbean, LGBTQ+ communities that we serve.”
According to the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), lawsuits have managed to keep the Trump administration and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) from implementing systemwide freezes on asylum cases, despite a pause on asylum decisions on applications from 40 countries.
As a result, there’s a growing coalition of immigrant advocates in New York City’s ongoing budget season pushing to fully fund the Rapid Immigrant Support and Empowerment (RISE) Network at $3.5 million in the upcoming budget for fiscal year 2027 to protect immigrant families. The budget hearing was scheduled for Wednesday, June 10, and the assumed budget is to be finalized by the end of the month.
Black immigrants have felt excluded from primarily white-led immigrant efforts and LGBTQ members of color often feel unseen in both white-led and general immigrant efforts. Many of these LGBTQ asylum seekers arrive in New York with deep trauma after fleeing systemic persecution, abuse, and family or community rejection based on their gender identity or sexual orientation. This is especially true for transgender refugees and asylum seekers, according to the CEP.
“I’m an immigrant. I’m also Black, but I’m also a trans woman, and there’s a lot of things to unpack there,” said Tiffany Jade Munroe, trans justice manager for CEP. She leads the Love On Us event, held annually on Trans Day of Visibility in Queens, which is funded by the state’s Lorena Borjas Transgender and Non-Binary Wellness and Equity Fund.
“I came seeking a lot of support and I found purpose,” said Munroe. “I also came looking for belonging and I found a movement that definitely lifts me up every single day. Today, I am proud to help lead a lot of efforts that empower transgender Caribbean immigrants, and a lot of LGBTQ+ New Yorkers. I also fight every single day to ensure that no one has to navigate this journey alone.”
This week, Congress narrowly passed President Donald Trump’s reconciliation bill that allocates $70 billion for ICE to seize and deport immigrants and for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to build a southern border wall. In addition, $350 million was allocated to ICE to arrest, detain, and deport a broadly defined group of immigrants in cities and states that Trump determined are not sufficiently cooperating with his mass deportation agenda.
“Instead of investing in the programs and services that help all working families thrive, Congress has handed ICE and Border Patrol a blank check to expand deportation, the private prison industry, and border militarization,” said New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) President and CEO Murad Awawdeh in a statement. “This taxpayer-funded windfall is built on the false premise that scapegoating and targeting immigrants will improve public safety or improve the lives of millions of Americans.”
This boon to ICE enforcement has stoked fear and distrust in many immigrant communities.
Amin said that even CEP’s monthly food distribution program, which has been running in Flatbush, Brooklyn, since 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, has had to move from its public location at Parkside Plaza to a trusted indoor space at P.S. 6 to give community members more safety in attending.
They continue to host “know your rights” workshops to keep each other safe and prepared, as well as continuing to provide legal support and consultation for community members. There are an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 LGBTQ immigrants in New York City, said Amin. CEP serves more than 650 LGBTQ asylum seekers, and 90% of their undocumented community members do not have access to legal services. The organization doesn’t have a physical location or a lawyer on staff at present, said Amin.
“We have been giving them the tools that they need to collect all the documents and have it ready in one place, make sure they share their lawyer information with their friends and family and chosen family, so just in case they were to be detained, they have someone on the outside to be able to advocate for them or to even reach the Caribbean Equality Project,” said Amin.
Kerrie Williams, a transgender woman from Guyana who is affiliated with CEP, was detained by ICE on December 29, 2025. She spent four months in a male detention center in New Orleans and was recently deported back to Guyana. As a Guyanese native, Munroe said that although the country is located in South America, it is culturally very Caribbean. Her family is a mix of Hindu and Christian, as well as Indo- and Afro-Caribbean. Because of that familial background, she was already seen as an “outsider” to some of her own. She said that LGBTQ rights are unheard of in Guyana.
“I used to see a lot of the trans folks within the country have to do survival sex work, just so that they can have safety for themselves, a place of belonging, but also food and clothing and shelter,” said Munroe, “because a lot of them would have faced a lot of family abandonment, similar to my story.”
Munroe said that people in Guyana have very distinct gender roles, and in her family’s eyes, she didn’t subscribe to anything masculine. For many Guyanese families, she said, having an LGBTQ relative was embarrassing and seen as a “curse.” Due to a lack of acceptance by her family, she experienced emotional trauma from childhood and became a target of hatred, attacks, and death threats.
“I tried to hide it so bad … because I saw the attacks [against] the LGBTQ community. I saw the attacks on trans bodies in Guyana. They don’t even see trans people as trans people. They call them male commercial sex workers and everyone is labeled by dead names,” said Munroe.
In her mid 20s, Munroe came home from work and saw all of her clothes in the street. She knew that she was homeless and disappointed in the people that claimed to love her. She began working toward getting a U.S. visa and tried three times before she received it. On arriving in NYC in 2019, she said she wasn’t educated about what asylum was until her initial meeting with Amin in Brooklyn. Eventually, she was connected to resources, like housing and a work permit, and began writing about her journey.
Munroe got her attorney for her asylum application and case through Immigration Equality, a referral from CEP. Some people either are never chosen or end up waiting more than a decade just to get an asylum interview. Amin added that 80% of CEP’s staff are trans and 60% are asylum seekers, many of whom have been waiting for a hearing for three to six years.
On a recommendation from Munroe’s lawyer, she filed a lawsuit against USCIS to get a date for her asylum interview. That was on May 4, 2026.
“Not everyone gets selected and it’s also due to capacity,” said Munroe. “I think … some [lawyers] are looking for cases that they know are very winnable.” She noted that many trans immigrants would need numerous documents, including news articles, police reports, and other items to prove their need for asylum. “That is what it looks like for us as a community … I just did my asylum interview a couple weeks ago, and I’m still waiting on a decision.”
In the meantime, the overall system has made sweeping changes to the process over the last few years because of the Trump administration, such as rushing full asylum hearings or ending cases before the asylum interview, an annual asylum fee of $102 for pending asylum applications and a new $100 initial filing fee, no new automatic work permit extensions, increased fee to apply for a first work permit, new security checks, and widespread reports of ICE arrests at immigration courts.
“Because of all the changes to immigration and asylum, and the restructuring of our immigration system, they are actually calling community members [who] filed their asylum case within the last two years,” said Amin. “That also has been a challenge, a tactic, and a strategy by USCIS to detain and deport asylum seekers because we are then having to find lawyers at a rapid pace to make sure that our community members have legal representation.”
In general, LGBTQ asylum seekers face significantly lower processing times and lower approval rates than heterosexual and cisgender counterparts, said Amin, as well as other issues like language barriers and an increased cost burden. Immigration legal costs can range anywhere between $1,000 and upward of $10,000.
“LGBTQ immigrants live at the intersection of invisibility and terror,” said Amin. “We have fled countries where our existence is criminalized … and we have crossed oceans and borders, risking everything to reach New York City, a city that promised safety and dignity. But what did we find? A legal system never built, never designed for us.”
At the state level, CEP’s funding and policy advocacy have made headway in the budget. They pushed for an increase to immigration services, particularly the allocation of $82.48 million to the Office for New Americans (ONA) to support immigration legal and ancillary services, and legislation that curbed ICE agents from wearing masks while on duty and bans them from certain locations, including churches, schools, parks and playgrounds, hospitals, polling sites, and childcare centers, without a judicial warrant.
Amin added that he’s disappointed that fundamental American rights fought for by Black civil rights activists are being erased at the federal level, such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 or the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
“In this moment, when I think about why this is necessary, when I think about what our work means to protect the community, I think about this fund and what it means for our community,” he said. “This fund means that transgender asylum speakers from Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico, Guyana will have attorneys to understand their story and fight for their safety.”
