US Welcome Corps helps resettle LGBTQ+ refugees fleeing anti-gay repression

SAN FRANCISCO — Cabrel Ngounou’s life in Cameroon quickly took a turn for the worse after neighbors caught the teen with his boyfriend.

A mob surrounded her boyfriend’s house and beat him. Ngounou’s family learned of this relationship and expelled him. So Ngounou fled – alone and with little money – on a dangerous four-year journey across at least five countries. He was sexually assaulted in a Libyan prison, harassed in Tunisia and tried unsuccessfully to take a boat to Europe.

“The worst thing was that they caught us. So it wasn’t easy for my family,” Ngounou said. “My sisters told me I had to leave the house because I didn’t belong there. So that’s what really pushed me to leave my country.

Ngounou’s problems gained attention after he took part in a protest outside the Tunisian office of the United Nations refugee agency. Eventually he arrived in the United States and landed in San Francisco in March.

Ngounou joined a growing number of LGBTQ+ people accepted into the Welcome Corps, launched last year and pairing groups of Americans with newly arrived refugees. So far, the resettlement program has connected 3,500 sponsors with 1,800 refugees, and many more want to help: 100,000 people have applied to become sponsors.

President Joe Biden has sought to rebuild the refugee programs that Donald Trump largely dismantled when he was president, working to streamline the process of selecting and placing people in America. New refugee resettlement sites have opened across the country, and on Tuesday the Biden administration announced it had resettled 100,000 refugees in fiscal year 2024, the most in more than three decades.

In contrast, Trump has pledged to bar refugees from entering Gaza, reinstate his ban on Muslims and impose “ideological control” on all immigrants if he regains the presidency. He and his running mate JD Vance are setting the stage for their goal of deporting millions of illegal immigrants by amplifying false claims, such as the accusation that Haitians are granted temporary protected status to remain legally in the United States eat pets in ohio.

Meanwhile, under Biden, two State Department human rights officials were tasked last year with identifying refugees facing persecution because of their sexual orientation or their human rights advocacy. ‘man.

“LGBTQ refugees are forced to flee their homes due to persecution and violence, much like other people,” said Jeremy Haldeman, deputy executive director of the Community Sponsorship Hub, which implements the Welcome Corps at name of the Department of State. But they are particularly vulnerable because they come from countries “where their identity is criminalized and where they risk imprisonment or even death”.

More than 60 countries have passed anti-LGBTQ laws and thousands have fled the Middle East and Africa to seek asylum in Europe. In April, Uganda’s Constitutional Court on Wednesday upheld an anti-homosexual law that authorizes the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.”

“There are just a lot of people who are really in danger and are not safe in their countries, and they are generally not safe in neighboring or regional countries either,” Kathryn Hampton, senior adviser for U.S. strategy at Rainbow Railroad, which helps LGBTQI+ people facing persecution.

Demand far exceeds capacity: Of more than 15,000 requests for assistance in 2023, the nonprofit helped resettle 23 refugees through the Welcome Corps program in cities as large as Houston and towns as small as Arlington, Vermont. Its goal is to reinstall 50 this year.

“So it’s very urgent as an organization to find and create new pathways that LGBTQI+ people can access to find safety,” Hampton said.

Another refugee in the program, Julieth Luna Garcia, is a transgender woman from El Salvador who settled in Chicago.

Speaking through a translator, Garcia, 31, said she suffered abuse from her family because of her trans identity and could not legally access care of gender affirmation until her arrival in the United States.

“I lived in constant fear, even more so at night. I didn’t like going out. I was really afraid that someone would find me alone and do something,” Garcia said. Since arriving in February, Garcia has found housing. live and a job as a home help and hopes to study to become a lawyer “Here, I’m not afraid to say who I am. I’m not afraid to tell anyone,” she said.

Perhaps the biggest change was starting hormone treatments, she said: “Seeing yourself in the mirror and seeing these changes, I can’t really explain it, but it’s really huge.” It’s a moving and exciting thing and something I thought I’d never experience.

Welcome Corps sponsors are expected to help refugees adjust for at least three months after arrival. Garcia said the five volunteers helped her “adjust to a new life with a little less difficulty”, by accessing social benefits, obtaining a work permit and enrolling in education courses. English.

Ngounou recalled how his sponsors, a seven-person team that included a lesbian couple, Anne Raeff and Lori Ostlund, took him in and connected him with LGBTQ resources and a job training program. They also served as his tour guides on gay life, taking him to the historically gay neighborhood of Castro, where Ngounou got his first glimpse of the huge rainbow pride flag and stopped to read every plaque honoring famous gay people.

“Cabrel was just very, very moved by it. I just started crying. We all did it,” Raeff recalls.

“I know that feeling like when we were young, when you went to a gay bar and you felt that feeling of freedom, like that community,” she said. “It was the only place you could go and really be open.” And that… it’s this community of people and we all have that in common.

Today, Ngounou, 19, works in a café and is taking university courses with the aim of becoming a social worker. He hopes the boyfriend he met in Tunisia can visit him in San Francisco – and he still finds it hard to believe they can openly share their love.

“Here, I’m really me… I feel free,” he says with a laugh. “I feel free to have my boyfriend and walk with him in the street. I feel free, you know, to have fun with him wherever we want to have fun. But in Tunisia or elsewhere, in Cameroon, he You have to hide these things.”