The Justice Department has instructed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to crack down on supposed “domestic terrorist” organizations, the definition of which includes those who promote “radical gender ideology.” Part of that crackdown involves the establishment of a cash reward system for providing information on leaders of so-called “domestic terrorist organizations.”
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memorandum to federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies on December 4, in accordance with NSPM-7, President Donald Trump’s September directive ordering the investigation of “domestic terrorist” organizations. At the time, NSPM-7 did not come with any enforcement mechanisms; Bondi’s memo provides specific instructions to prosecutors and law enforcement agencies.
The Bondi memo was leaked on December 8, and on Tuesday, LGBTQ Nation first reported on the fact that the memo includes “radical gender ideology” as part of its definition of “domestic terrorism.” In additional to “radical gender ideology,” the memo also defines potential domestic terrorist ideologies as “extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders… anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity… hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality,” and more. Under the Trump administration, “radical gender ideology” has been used as a catchall phrase to encompass issues related to trans and nonbinary communities.
The memo encourages prosecutors to “be particularly mindful of the potential applicability” of charges such as “picketing or parading with intent to obstruct the administration of justice,” “obstruction during civil disorders,” and “providing material support for terrorist activity.” In other words, the memo encourages prosecutors to press charges against certain forms of protest, or for providing supposed aid to organizations that promote what the government is now defining as “terrorist activity.”
The material support statute, in particular, has been used to significantly hinder the work of humanitarian groups, and has been widely criticized for prohibiting free speech. According to the ACLU, material support is defined as any “service,” “training,” “expert advice or assistance,” or “personnel” — an incredibly vague definition that has been used to surveil people and groups without basis since the implementation of the Patriot Act in 2001. Contemporarily, Hina Shamsi, the director of the ACLU’s national security project, wrote about the worrying implications of NSPM-7 on the ACLU’s website in October, stating, “If anyone needed proof that ‘terrorism’ and ‘political violence’ are slippery and fraught categories subject to political, ideological, and racial manipulation and bias — well, this is it.”
The Bondi memo also specifically instructs federal law enforcement agencies to “review their files and holdings for Antifa and Antifa-related intelligence,” and deliver those materials to the FBI within 14 days of its issuance. The FBI is also set to “compile a list of groups of entities engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism” within 30 days of issuance. The FBI will also “disseminate an intelligence bulletin on Antifa and Antifa-aligned anarchist violent extremist groups,” including information on “structures, funding sources, and tactics.” Lastly, the memo directs the FBI to better publicize its domestic terrorism tip line, and will “establish a cash reward system for information that leads to the successful identification and arrest of individuals in the leadership of domestic terrorist organizations.”
The language contained in the Bondi memo is reminiscent of that found in a September report from independent journalist Ken Klippenstein. In the report, two anonymous national security experts claimed that the FBI intended to categorize trans people as “Nihilistic Violent Extremists,” a threat category that was created earlier this year. The FBI defines “Nihilistic Violent Extremism” as “criminal conduct… in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos.” This also ties neatly into the ongoing right-wing attempts to scapegoat trans people for mass shootings and other forms of gun violence, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Notably, all of the federal government’s messaging about “domestic terrorism” ignores the fact that the vast majority of research points to the fact that the bulk of domestic terrorists in the U.S. are aligned with the right-wing.
In the midst of the Trump administration’s attacks on both the LGBTQ community and immigrants, the non-profit organization Immigration Equality is working to ensure that queer asylum seekers and refugees have access to legal services.
Immigration Equality, which has represented LGBTQ immigrants since it was founded in 1994, has been a haven for individuals who come from countries where they are persecuted for their identity. They offer both direct representation and a program where asylum seekers’ cases are vetted and matched with pro-bono lawyers.
But since the Trump administration’s recent attacks on immigrants, the process of filing these individuals’ cases and fighting for their safety has become significantly more difficult. Immigration Equality’s director of law and policy, Bridget Crawford, noted in an interview with Gay City News that Trump has been attacking all cases, not just a certain few.
“A lot of what the Trump administration seems to be focused on is not efficient, fair adjudication of claims,” she said. “It seems to be focused on eliminating the claims altogether and preventing people from making them, or quickly dispensing with them without due process.”
Alongside blocking initial claims from being made and removing more than one-third of immigration judges, the appellate courts are also shifting their decisions to move less favorably toward immigrants, despite many of these cases having overwhelming evidence that they meet the requirements for refugee status and protection.
All of these obstacles have resulted in an uptick in Immigration Equality’s cases being denied, and these issues are being further inflamed after Trump recently announced the pause of many immigrant cases, following the shooting of two West Virginia National Guard members.
But Crawford made sure to note that despite these hardships, Immigration Equality is still winning cases.
“We still have many people, both trans and LGB, who are successful in their claims,” she said. “The reality is that under the law, as it is written, and the precedent as it’s been established for decades, these are very strong claims — people continue to win because they meet the definition of asylum under our law.”
These policies have invoked fear in immigrants pursuing a case, as they are scared of not having their case heard and fear showing up for their case and being put into detention centers, despite following all the correct procedures. Being LGBTQ amplifies this fear.
“As an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, we have long witnessed mistreatment of our population in the immigration detention system,” Crawford said. A 2024 report published by Immigration Equality revealed that under both Democratic and Republican administrations, there were consistent reports of “sexual harassment, verbal and sexual abuse, physical abuse, prolonged solitary confinement, and inadequate medical care.”
The few protections that were in place to prevent this abuse have gradually been gutted, according to Crawford. These included internal watchdog agencies like the Civil Rights Civil Liberties (CRCL). In the past, if someone filed a complaint of mistreatment, it would be investigated by these internal agencies. Recently, though, these complaints have not been looked into.
Against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies, the work of Immigration Equality is their clients find hope in them, Immigration Equality finds hope in its clients.
“They are the reason we all went into this work in the first place,” said Crawford. “We have these incredible stories of bravery and perseverance that serve as a source of inspiration for all of us. So many of our clients have survived so much worse, and we look to them for a sense of perspective.”
Transgender youth in Pennsylvania and their families are celebrating a significant legal victory. A federal court in Philadelphia has rebuffed the Department of Justice’s sweeping attempt to obtain highly personal medical records from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia about children receiving gender-affirming care.
On Friday, federal district Judge Mark A. Kearney in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania issued an order quashing DOJ subpoena demands for names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, home addresses, and clinical notes covering minors treated since January 2020. The court found the government “lacks statutory authority for a rambling exploration of the Hospital’s files to learn the names and medical treatment of children.”
Families in Pennsylvania had filed separate motions to quash subpoenas issued by the Trump administration in July that alleged fraud in gender-affirming care. As The Advocatereported, the subpoenas demanded exhaustive data on minors, including “intake forms, consent paperwork, and parental authorizations for puberty blockers and hormone therapy.”
Kearney’s decision reaffirms that the records in question concern lawful medical treatment governed under Pennsylvania law, and that children’s and families’ constitutional privacy interests “far outweigh” the government’s asserted investigative needs. The ruling also criticizes the DOJ’s shifting justifications, noting that at one point the government “replaced” and reminding that “false statements may be subject to a perjury investigation.”
The ruling arrives amid a broader national crackdown on gender-affirming care by the Trump administration, which in July announced more than 20 subpoenas to clinics and hospitals across multiple states. The American Medical Association and other major professional organizations had already pushed back, affirming such treatments as evidence-based and lifesaving.
For advocates and legal counsel representing the children, the decision is a vindication of long-held concerns about governmental overreach. “This is a critical win for everyone who believes healthcare decisions should be made in doctors’ offices, not the White House,” Mimi McKenzie of the Public Interest Law Center said in a press release. Attorney Jill Steinberg of the law firm Ballard Spahr added that the decision signals to transgender youth and their families that they “do not have to fight these battles alone.”
The State Department quietly updated its website this week to signal that the Trump administration may move to invalidate passports held by transgender Americans, following a Supreme Court emergency ruling that overturned earlier protections on gender-marker updates. The change was first spotted by journalist Aleksandra, who writes as Transitics on Substack. Until recently, the website assured transgender passport holders that their documents would “remain valid until [their] expiration date.” As of Thursday morning, that language had been replaced with: “A passport is valid for travel until its date of expiration, until you replace it, or until we invalidate it under federal regulations.” The new phrasing has sparked alarm across the transgender community, with one government source telling Erin in the Morning that there is growing interest within the administration in exploring some level of revocations.
The change comes one week after the Supreme Court issued an emergency ruling allowing the Trump administration’s passport restrictions on transgender people to take effect. In that decision, the Court concluded that the administration is likely to prevail in ongoing litigation, and rejected the argument that the policy was driven by “a bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group.” This conclusion stands in stark contrast to the administration’s own executive orders enabling the passport crackdown, which describe transgender people as inherently “wrong,”“dishonorable,” and “socially coercive.”
“The Court ignores these critical limits on its equitable discretion today. The Government seeks to enforce a questionably legal new policy immediately, but it offers no evidence that it will suffer any harm if it is temporarily enjoined from doing so, while the plaintiffs will be subject to imminent, concrete injury if the policy goes into effect,” responded Justice Jackson in her dissent.
Previously, there were signs that a Trump administration victory in court could trigger efforts to invalidate transgender people’s passports. As first reported by Erin in the Morning, a single paragraph in a government filing stated that “if the government prevails in this case and the Department proceeds to revoke and replace passports issued pursuant to the preliminary injunction, the Department will incur additional administrative costs.” At the time, some observers dismissed this as routine legal positioning. But the State Department’s latest website change suggests the administration may, in fact, be preparing to take exactly that step.
One government source familiar with internal discussions said such conversations are indeed underway, though any revocation effort would be difficult to carry out and would almost certainly ensnare some cisgender people by mistake. According to the source, the most likely targets would be passport holders with X markers and those who updated their documents through the affidavit process—a temporary pathway created under lower-court rulings that allowed transgender people to obtain corrected passports if they signed a sworn statement attesting to their gender identity. At the time, EITM reported that the State Department was collecting data on every person who signed the affidavit in case a ruling like this arrived, enabling the government to potentially invalidate those passports. Now, that appears to be one of the avenues the administration is actively considering.
For those who updated their passports before this administration, any attempt to revoke those documents would be far more complicated. The process would be costly, the relevant information is not easily accessible, and such actions would almost certainly run into additional legal hurdles and face separate court challenges. And for anyone whose passport the government does seek to change, the law guarantees an appeal with a hearing on request—an extraordinarily expensive and resource-intensive process for an agency that is not equipped to handle a surge of such cases.
When asked what the process would look like for transgender people traveling overseas if their passports were revoked, the source told EITM that those individuals would likely be contacted and instructed to report to the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate to replace their passport or receive special guidance. Such a requirement could severely disrupt international travel for transgender people. For now, however, any move in this direction appears to be weeks or even months away—if the administration chooses to pursue it at all.
Meanwhile, the case will continue in the lower courts, a process that could drag on for years. And while those courts could, in theory, rule in favor of transgender plaintiffs, recent Supreme Court actions suggest the justices are prepared to side with the administration on virtually any policy targeting trans people. The Court is already set to hear a case in January that will determine whether transgender Americans receive equal protection under the law at all, and the memory of the Skrmetti decision—upholding bans on trans youth care—still hangs heavily over the legal landscape. In the meantime, transgender people in the United States are left to navigate shifting rules in nearly every aspect of daily life under an administration and a Republican Party intent on making that life as difficult as possible.
President Donald Trump’s administration has warned Vermont that its policies meant to support LGBTQ foster youth may violate federal law, potentially threatening federal funding.
The Oct. 16 letter, written by Alex Adams, assistant secretary of the federal Administration for Children and Families, directed Vermont Secretary of Human Services Jenney Samuelson to provide a written response explaining how the state would address Adams’ concerns.
“It has been brought to my attention that certain policies and procedures in Vermont deny qualified foster and adoptive parents the opportunity to provide children a loving home solely because they cannot, in good conscience, commit to affirming a hypothetical child’s gender identity,” Adams wrote. “Such policies are contrary to the purpose of child welfare programs and inconsistent with our interpretation of federal diligent recruitment plans and constitutional protections, including the First Amendment.”
Other states, including Massachusetts, New York and California, have received similar letters. Vermont’s involvement was first reported by The Imprint, a nonprofit news publication focused on vulnerable children and families. About a third of foster youth identify as LGBTQ, according to multiple studies.
While Adams’ letter does not reference specific Vermont policies, in 2024, two Vermont couples sued the Department for Children and Families, arguing that policies requiring foster parents to affirm a foster child’s sexual orientation or gender identity are unconstitutional and discriminate against Christians. A second lawsuit related to foster parent policies was later brought by a separate family that year.
The prominent conservative legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom represented the couples in the first suit. Similar lawsuits have cropped up across the country, including in Oregon, where a federal appeals court eventually ruled the state’s policies intended to protect LGBTQ foster youth violated free speech. The Vermont lawsuits now sit with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after the families appealed a lower court’s ruling against them.
Per Vermont’s Department for Children and Families policy, “discrimination and bias based on a child or youth’s real or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression” is prohibited.
A department spokesperson said no one was available Tuesday for an interview regarding the letter from the federal government and instead requested questions in writing.
In a statement, Aryka Radke, a Department for Children and Families deputy commissioner, wrote that the department “is committed to ensuring that young people in our custody are safe and supported. We are currently reviewing the letter with our legal team.”
Radke did not respond to questions about what funding could be at risk.
While Adams, in the letter, did not explicitly threaten to withhold federal funding from Vermont, he did allude to the possibility.
“Please provide a written response outlining how you will review and, where necessary, amend policies to bring them into alignment with these values and applicable law,” he wrote. “As you know, my responsibilities include monitoring the use of relevant federal funds and ensuring compliance with federal law.”
The Administration for Children and Families did not respond to a request for comment.
President Donald Trump’s second term has especially targeted two groups in particular: immigrants and LGBTQ people. On his first day in office, he ended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, which left thousands of refugees who had already been approved to live in the United States stranded. He also drastically lowered the cap on the number of refugees allowed to enter the U.S. from 125,000 to 7,500. Thankfully, Immigration Equality is here to help.
“For many decades, we’ve seen clients arrive with nothing but hope and fear, and walk out with safety and freedom,” Anto Chavez, Immigration Equality’s communications director, told LGBTQ Nation. “It’s just becoming harder to fight, but we’re still here with them. We still hold their hand every step of the way. We have more than 700 active legal cases, our legal staff trains thousands of lawyers nationwide to represent queer immigrants pro bono, and we fight in the courts and Congress to expand protections.”
Founded in 1994, Immigration Equality provides free legal help for immigrants and asylum seekers who are LGBTQ+ or HIV-positive. The group is fighting Trump’s seemingly arbitrary executive orders on immigration in courts — and winning.
Chavez spoke with LGBTQ Nation about how the sociocultural landscape around immigration has changed now that Trump is back in office and what average citizens can do to fight for the rights of queer immigrants in our community.
For forever, immigrant communities have learned how to take care of each other without relying on systems that have failed us. We have to continue to do that. We have to continue to fight. Anto Chavez, Immigration Equality communications director
LGBTQ Nation: What has changed under Trump’s second term for immigrants applying for asylum to escape anti-LGBTQ persecution in their home countries?
Anto Chavez: The anti-immigrant rhetoric has shaped the culture and the cultural shift in our country; this happened during Trump’s term as well. But it really changes how queer immigrants even envision themselves in the U.S.
At the beginning of this administration, some of our clients were refugees. We have an asylum program and a refugee program. Historically, we have worked with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), but we opened up our refugee program a few years ago. After we launched it, some folks were really scared to even just decide to come to the U.S. I think there was a lot of misinformation, [but] this is still a place that’s safer for many folks.
But when it comes to policy — I mean, if we talk about refugee work, every avenue has been blocked for us. The refugee resettlement program went from thousands a year to zero, and so we’ve had to really look into other options.
How has Donald Trump’s executive order drastically lowering the refugee cap affected refugees who were already approved?
Since January 20, after the executive order suspending the refugee resettlement program and halting the process for many folks, we had people who were ready to travel and had to cancel. So for queer and trans asylum seekers, this means just fewer pathways for relocation or protection from persecution.
The U.S. has historically been a place where queer immigrants have been able to come and live freely. It’s scary to think it’s starting to change.
There are increased barriers for asylum seekers who are already here as well. Policies like what was called “Remain in Mexico,” were reinstated. The CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) One app, which allowed those migrating for humanitarian reasons to schedule asylum interviews at ports of entry, was ended, and existing appointments were canceled.
There has been increased deportation, including of multiple LGBTQ asylum seekers. There’s also the abuse that happens in detention, particularly to queer and trans immigrants. It’s just out of this world. We have some reports that queer immigrants are more likely to be assaulted and abused in ICE detention and put into solitary confinement.
LGBTQ Nation spoke with Rainbow Railroad, an international not-for-profit organization that helps LGBTQ+ people escape state-sponsored violence, and two refugees that the group has helped to better understand the plight of queer asylum seekers looking to settle in the United States amid the president’s xenophobic attacks on immigrants.
It was a bracingly cold night a year ago last December when Javi (not his real name) found himself exiting the jetway at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. After a five-hour flight from the Salvadoran capital of San Salvador, he literally had no idea where he was going.
Described by those who know him as a good-looking guy — about 5’9″, with dark hair and a beautiful smile — Javi, 30, grew up in a small town in El Salvador among a religious and “very conservative” family, including an uncle who had a problem with him.
“He said, ‘I’m gonna kill you, because in my family, it’s not allowed to have a fa**ot,’” Javi recounted well enough in English, his second language.
His uncle was a cop assigned to El Salvador’s Supreme Court.
“The police in El Salvador are very, very corrupt,” Javi explained. But when Javi shared the threat with his family, they did nothing to support him. They already suspected Javi’s uncle of shooting his brother in an incident the year before, and were powerless to help, even if they wanted to.
“My family never supported me because I’m gay,” Javi said.
There had been other threats when he was growing up, but this time was different, more overt.
Javi decided to leave. It was the first of several moves that took Javi around the country as terror gripped El Salvador under the authoritarian regime of President Nayib Bukele.
The charismatic leader, first elected in 2019 at the age of 38, unleashed police and the army across the country to address gang crime, sent troops into the legislature to force votes, and enabled his own indefinite reelection after ending a historic ban on consecutive presidential terms.
Despite aligning with the LGBTQ+ community early in his political career, Bukele broke a pledge supporting marriage equality and vowed to remove “all traces” of “gender ideologies in schools and colleges.” He purged workers from the government, promoting policies that were “incompatible” with his “patriotic and family values” agenda.
LGBTQ+ people were now officially under threat in El Salvador, in a terror campaign sanctioned by the government and carried out by foot soldiers like Javi’s uncle.
Paranoia ran rampant in the community. Javi saw suspicious men surveilling one building he lived in, “Secret Service agents or something like that.” Police and military officers appeared in the building’s hallways, taking photographs.
“That was not normal, having somebody in a mask for surveillance in your building,” he said.
People are forcibly displaced from their home, whether it’s for climate disaster reasons, or geopolitical crises, or in the case of LGBTQ+ people, it’s because of their identity or because of who they love, or because of who they are.Jamaican queer refugee, Latoya Nugent
Javi was detained on the way to lunch from work one day by a dozen police officers who accused him of stealing a phone. They asked, “‘Why are you shaking?’ Because I was very nervous. Why did they choose me to detain and not somebody else?”
When they saw his identification, “the narrative changed,” Javi said.
They said the town on his ID was a “dangerous place” and “then they accused me of being a gangster, not stealing the phone.”
“I was detained for like 45 minutes on the street while they were doing the investigation, and it was a horrible experience, because they hit me, and they threatened me, saying, ‘You are going to the jail,’ and this kind of stuff.”
They didn’t discover he was gay, Javi said. Whether or not they had, Javi could have been detained indefinitely under legislation passed by Bukele’s government, suspending due process in service of his anti-gang crusade.
“All of your constitutional rights are cut off, because that is the law now,” Javi said.
It’s one reason the Trump administration accepted Bukele’s offer earlier this year to house U.S. detainees in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison.
Other incidents followed, Javi said: more masked officers sighted, neighbors screaming then suddenly silenced, cars and apartments inspected and photographed.
None of it “was normal,” Javi said.
Javi’s detention on the street two years ago ended with his release and a warning — and his own determination that life in El Salvador was no longer tenable for him.
Refugees may need a helping hand and support in the beginning, because they’re often relocating with limited or no resources. But the minute they get that support, they start to integrate, and they go on to live very self-sufficient lives and make significant contributions to their communities.Jamaican queer refugee, Latoya Nugent
Latoya Nugent came to the same conclusion in Jamaica three years ago.
“People do not become refugees by choice,” said the engagement director for Rainbow Railroad, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that helps relocate and resettle LGBTQ+ refugees in the United States and Canada.
Nugent spoke with the lilting accent she brought to Toronto in 2022.
“People are forcibly displaced from their home, whether it’s for climate disaster reasons, or geopolitical crises, or in the case of LGBTQ+ people, it’s because of their identity or because of who they love, or because of who they are, right?”
Nugent has watched with dismay as the second Trump administration shuts down refugee admissions to the United States.
Trump issued an executive order on his very first day in office suspending all refugee admissions to the U.S., and a presidential determination on September 30 lowered the ceiling on refugees from a cap of 125,000 set by the Biden administration last year to just 7,500 in 2025.
The downsized and refocused U.S. program will almost entirely benefit just one group of asylum seekers: white South Africans.
It’s a mindset “steeped in anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia,” Nugent said of Trump’s nativist immigration goals.
The idea that refugees are criminals waiting to prey on American “suckers”, to use a favored Trump description, or “just looking for handouts” in Nugent’s words, misses the point of refugee relocation and assistance, she says.
“Yes, I appreciate and I accept that refugees may need a helping hand and support in the beginning, because they’re often relocating with limited or no resources. But the minute they get that support, they start to integrate, and they go on to live very self-sufficient lives and make significant contributions to their communities,” she said.
Supporting refugees to the U.S. is an investment in communities, she says, not an invitation to do crime in them.
“I tell people — I mean, I’m very open about this, like, this has been my own experience, too. Yes, I live in Canada, but when I was forced to flee my home country, I needed support in the first few months to help me to restart and to rebuild. And this is what happens to a lot of LGBTQ+ refugees.”
It’s also the kind of assistance Rainbow Railroad is expanding after nearly 20 years helping them.
Named for the Underground Railroad of secret routes and safe houses that led fugitive slaves to freedom in the United States in the late 18th and 19th centuries, the NGO was founded in 2006 with a similar purpose: to help relocate LGBTQ+ people experiencing violence in their home countries to more affirming nations free from the same kinds of persecution.
The group has assisted nearly 40,000 individuals since their founding, including over 2200 refugees supported through emergency relocation assistance in crisis situations like the anti-gay purges in Chechnya in 2017 and 2018 and the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021.
In 2024 alone, Rainbow Railroad received 13,402 requests for help, supported 5,886 people, and relocated 302 LGBTQ+ individuals from 36 countries.
While dislocation due to war, famine and persecution of all kinds roils the planet in ever-greater numbers — 1 in every 69 people globally is forcibly displaced, or about 115 million people — only about 5% of those in need of resettlement received it last year.
Integrating refugees has become a key element in an expanded remit for Rainbow Railroad, as they look to both broaden their mission and grapple with the U.S government slamming the door on new LGBTQ+ arrivals.
Rainbow Railroad’s Nugent says the initial support that refugees may need has been “weaponized against them” and “used in a lot of spaces to demonize refugees.”
The same executive order that halted refugee admissions in January slashed a State Department program designed specifically to help integrate refugees into U.S. communities.
It was called Welcome Corps.
“What the Welcome Corps program did was it allowed groups of volunteers of five-plus people to sponsor a refugee from overseas, and they would work with the refugee when they arrived for a three-month period to help to connect them with resources,” Nugent said.
The Biden administration initiative went live in 2023, and Rainbow Railroad became a partner, sponsoring travel to the U.S. and welcoming LGBTQ+ refugees to the country.
One of the first Welcome Corps arrivals: Javi from El Salvador.
“I never knew I was traveling from El Salvador to Chicago,” he said. “When I was in the airport was the moment when I realized I was traveling here.”
Javi spent close to a year speaking with different organizations about how to escape El Salvador, and came to the attention of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a United Nations-affiliated group. They brought Javi together with Welcome Corps and Rainbow Railroad.
“For security reasons, they only told me, basically, just the important information, but nothing about the place, nothing about who will be your sponsors, or who or where to go,” Javi says with a note of incredulity.
You can hear in his voice a kind of astonishment that he was now entrusting his life and future to a group of people he didn’t know in a place he’d never been, wherever that turned out to be.
At least life in El Salvador was the devil he knew.
“And it was very cold here,” Javi adds with a laugh.
He didn’t look happy, says one of his sponsors.
Bruce Koff, a longtime board member for Rainbow Railroad, organized what the org called a Community of Care group for Javi as part of their Welcome Corps partnership.
A therapist by trade, Koff brought together four gay men, including a Colombian social worker, two emigres from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and his own husband. They were tasked with settling Javi into his new community.
“We didn’t want to all go out to the airport at once and kind of overwhelm him,” Koff recounted. “We had no idea what that might be, what his state was.”
Mauricio, the Spanish speaker in the group, and David, one of the emigres, welcomed Javi at the airport.
“Two people were waiting for me, and in that moment I realized, these are from Rainbow Railroad,” Javi said, recalling a sense of relief.
“There are so many different opportunities to do good in the world…. But to actually have the experience of seeing one individual life transformed from one of fear and desperation to one of hope and stability is magical.Bruce Koff, a longtime board member for Rainbow Railroad
Still, it was an awkward first few hours for the refugee as he took in his new surroundings and literally acclimated to Chicago in December.
David and Mauricio took Javi to a restaurant to meet the other members of the group before heading to the apartment he’d be sharing with a friend of Bruce and his husband Mitchell.
“He spoke maybe about three or four words of English at the time, but we made sure he had a good, warm meal, and that he met us and knew who we were and what we were there to do,” Koff said.
“Mauricio spoke fluent Spanish, so there was that comfort, as well, that we could communicate with Javi from the very beginning.”
But it was a big meal and Javi wasn’t eating that much, Koff recalled.
“So I turned to him, and I said in my just okay Spanish, ‘You have to finish your meal, because you now have five mothers’ — cinco madres.” And he understood that, and he laughed. And it was such a relief to see him laugh, you know, in that first hour or two with us. And he’s been amazing ever since.”
Javi’s sponsors settled him in over their allotted three months with a small stipend from Rainbow Railroad and a GoFundMe campaign that raised enough to cover his expenses and bank a little more. The group helped with his work authorization, obtaining a Social Security number, applying for a green card, opening a bank account, and finding healthcare. His roommate plastered their apartment with Post-It notes that showed the English word for practically every object in it.
Javi found two food service jobs to get on his feet — “He’s very good with a budget,” Koff says — and now he’s working at a nonprofit doing community outreach with the Latin community. He already has a degree in social work earned in El Salvador; now he wants to pursue his master’s.
It’s just the kind of refugee success story Rainbow Railroad’s Nugent described.
“Honestly, he’s everything you want in someone coming to this country,” Koff said. “I mean, without exaggeration, he is such a fine person with a good mind who wants to contribute to the common good, and just make a good life for himself.”
“The only caveat to that,” Koff adds, “is the times that we live in, right? And the concerns that even though his status is completely legal, we have no idea what sort of risk he may still be facing.”
With Welcome Corps eliminated and refugee admissions now slashed, Rainbow Railroad is focused on resettlement efforts for refugees and asylum seekers already in the U.S.
They’re recruiting volunteers for a revived sponsor program with the same responsibilities, and launched a Community Access Fund to distribute money to service providers, community activists, and grassroots organizations supporting LGBTQ+ asylum seekers and other displaced migrants. A new Rainbow Housing Drive connects volunteer hosts with LGBTQ+ newcomers.
Contributing to the common good is a common theme among the refugees Nugent and Koff have worked with.
There was the very first person Rainbow Railroad relocated with Welcome Corps — to Washington DC — wide-eyed at his married sponsors walking hand-in-hand on the street and vowing to start his own support team to pay the support he was given forward.
There was the refugee relocated to San Francisco whose volunteer group helped land him a job. After he got his first paycheck, he asked, “Which organization in my community works with LGBTQI youth, because I want to donate to that organization.”
And there’s Javi, who’s shared his refugee experience with others contemplating an escape from persecution. He recently spoke with a young man in Uganda.
“It’s great to share the experience with other people about how they can change their life,” he said. “In those kinds of countries, it’s illegal to be gay. For gay people it’s very complicated even to have a good conversation with somebody, because all the time they are afraid to share their experience. I can help with that.”
It’s a virtuous cycle for refugees and volunteers alike.
“There are so many different opportunities to do good in the world,” says Koff. “This was just one, but to actually have the experience of seeing one individual life transformed from one of fear and desperation to one of hope and stability is magical. And it just helped me to realize that I don’t have to spend the day worrying about what’s the best way to respond to adversity in this world. There’s always a way to help.”
“They build community so quickly,” Nugent says of refugees. “They finally find that sense of home, and it makes them feel human. That’s it. It makes them feel human. And they show up in the world differently.”
“Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go,” protestors chanted in the middle of Times Square, among a sea of signs that read “love reigns not kings,” “gays against faux-king Trump,” “we stand with … our trans family,” and “the future is coming.”
On Saturday, independent analysts estimated that the No Kings March drew between 5 and 8 million people, and organizers say over 7 million people attended 2,700 events across all 50 states. The event, which was organized to push against the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S., was the largest single-day protest in America since 1970.
Among the crowd were countless LGBTQ people, fighting back against an administration that has introduced a litany of anti-LGBTQ executive orders and used vile rhetoric to denigrate queer people. This backsliding of LGBTQ rights, according to experts, has a deep connection to authoritarianism, with research showing that when governments weaken protections for queer and trans people, they often turn to broader democratic institutions next.
“Threats to democratic institutions and threats to LGBTQ rights are mutually reinforcing, generating a vicious cycle that strengthens authoritarian control,” Ari Shaw, director of International Programs at the Williams Institute, told Uncloseted Media. “Increased persecution of minority groups, including LGBTI people, is itself evidence of democratic backsliding by indicating the erosion of liberal democratic norms [meant to protect] minority rights.”
Legal Abuse of Power
One of the ways the Trump administration’s abuse of power has been most evident is through its legal actions.
He’s also slashed HIV funding at a staggering rate. Uncloseted Media estimates that the National Institutes of Health has terminated more than $1 billion worth of grants to HIV-related research, including 71% of all global HIV grants.
It was these cuts that prompted Brooklynite Jeffrey Cipriano to turn out to protest. “The specific reason that I’m protesting is actually on the shirt I’m wearing,” says Cipriano, referring to his red “This is what an HIV advocate looks like” t-shirt.
“My best friend works for an organization called AIDS United. … His job is to travel the country and help people get AIDS medication, specifically trans and unhoused community members. But his job is at risk,” he says. “The end outcome of his work is that people who have issues in their lives have the issues resolved, and that’s going away under the current administration.”
Executive orders are based on powers granted to the president by the U.S. Constitution or by Congressional statutes. The president cannot use an executive order to create new laws or spend money unless Congress has authorized it. They are meant to direct how existing laws are implemented. But Trump has ignored democratic norms, often filling agencies with loyal supporters, using orders to go after political opponents, and pushing the limits of what the law allows.
In some cases, he has moved illegally. “The President is directing various executive branch officials to adopt policy that has either not yet been adopted by Congress or is in violation of existing statutory law,” says Jodi Short, professor of law at UC Law San Francisco. “The analogy to a king and what has troubled many about this presidency is the sheer consolidation of executive branch power in one individual.”
Short’s colleague, Dave Owen, agrees. “Illegality has been rampant,” he told Uncloseted Media in an email. “People are often cynical about the government, and they might think what Trump’s doing is nothing new. But most of the time, the executive branch takes the law seriously, and both legal constraints and norms of good governance matter,” he wrote. He says that through history, there’s been “a lot more integrity and a lot less lawlessness than most people realize.”
“This administration has broken with those traditions,” he adds.
Revolt Against Executive Orders
Many Americans have recognized this. A survey from April found that 85% of Americans agreed or strongly agreed that the president should obey federal court rulings even if he doesn’t like them.
In response to Trump’s overreach, more than 460 legal challenges have been filed across the country challenging his executive actions. One of these is a federal lawsuit by Lambda Legal and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation that challenges the constitutionality of the Trump administration’s ban on military service by transgender people. Another lawsuit challenges Trump’s order directing federal agencies to withhold funds from medical providers and institutions that provide gender-affirming medical treatments for people under 19.
Both of those lawsuits are one reason 17-year-old Zoe Boik came out to protest with her friends and her dad. “Obviously, I’m disappointed and kind of helpless because there’s nothing I can directly do to change or impact anything that’s going on,” says Boik, who identifies as pansexual and gender fluid and is not legally allowed to vote.
Boik—who was seven years old when Trump announced his run for presidency in 2015—says she’s doing a research paper on Trump’s trans military ban and is frustrated because she sees it as inexplicable discrimination. “They’re not letting trans people serve… which doesn’t make any sense.”
LGBTQ Rights and Democratic Backsliding
This type of blatant discrimination is often a key sign of a country moving closer to authoritarianism and away from democracy. According to a 2023 research paper by Shaw and his colleagues, anti-LGBTQ stigma may contribute “to the erosion of democratic norms and institutions.”
The paper found that when a country with relatively high acceptance of LGBTQ rights introduces anti-LGBTQ legislation, it clashes with what most people believe and can weaken public trust in democracy, deepen political divides, and make it easier for populist or extremist movements to gain power.
“The level of acceptance of LGBTQ people is closely associated with the strength of democracy in a country,” Shaw says. “In some cases, we even saw that rising anti-LGBTQ rhetoric or policies preceded a broader decline in democracy.”
In Brazil, for example, early democratic gains coincided with rising LGBTQ acceptance, including legal recognition of same-sex unions and workplace protections. But as populist President Jair Bolsonaro came into power in 2019, he began questioning—without evidence—the security of Brazil’s voting systems, saying he would only lose his re-election campaign if there were fraud. He was also accused of trying to intervene in operations held by the Federal Police about the alleged criminal conduct of his sons, and he told his ministers that he had the power and he would interfere—without exception—in all cabinet ministries. At the same time, LGBTQ protections were rolled back, and schools and civil society faced censorship, suggesting that falling LGBTQ acceptance may have “preceded Brazil’s democratic erosion,” according to Shaw’s paper. In September of this year, Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a military coup.
Another example is Poland’s democracy weakening since 2015 under the Law and Justice Party, which consolidated power by undermining the Constitutional Tribunal, installing loyal judges, and restricting independent media. Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric became central to the party’s nationalist platform, fueling the creation of nearly 100 “LGBT ideology-free zones,” inciting violence against LGBTQ individuals, and stymying legal recourse through politicized courts.
When it comes to LGBTQ rights, Trump has mimicked the moves of these leaders even though most of his constituents don’t want it: A 2022 survey from the Public Religion Research Institute found that 80% of Americans favor laws that would protect LGBTQ people against discrimination.
“The definition of an authoritarian system is a system where power is consolidated in one individual whose power is unchecked by any other institution. And I fear that in certain domains, that’s the direction in which this administration is trying to move us,” says Short. “I think it’s incredibly dangerous.”
Attacks on Higher Education
Another common tool in the authoritarian playbook is attacking higher education.
While many universities are rejecting Trump’s demands, others are experiencing a chilling effect, changing their policies before the administration tries to hold up funds.
“I’m here because I’m angry and I feel that we aren’t angry enough,” Maddy Everlith, a sophomore gender studies major at Pace University, told Uncloseted Media as she marched with her friends. “Being a woman of color in America and having so many intersectional identities is also what affects me.… I want to stand up and advocate for other people.”
Everlith’s university responded to Trump’s threats in September by renaming its DEI office to the “Division of Opportunity and Institutional Excellence.”
“I am beyond horrified how quickly our university was willing to bend the knee on this decision,” Austin Chappelle, a senior at Pace, told the student newspaper. This change comes in the midst of uncertainty under the Trump administration, which has already caused many LGBTQ students to feel uneasy on campus.
“It’s part of an electoral strategy to try to mobilize right-wing voters to distract from other sorts of political or economic scandals,” Shaw says, adding that this tactic is another way to gain power.
The pain of this rhetoric has affected millions of trans Americans and allies alike, including Lars Kindem, a 64-year-old retired pilot from Minnesota who was marching to support his transgender sister.
“What Trump has done is he’s taken people that haven’t done anything wrong and has turned them into scapegoats,” he says, adding that Trump’s language is “hateful, petty, mean, and hurtful.”
He says his sister and her partner are having issues getting the correct gender markers issued on their passports. Because of the Trump administration’s treatment of the community, they are making plans to move to Denmark, where “there’s a lot more acceptance.”
Christian Nationalism
This scapegoating has played into the hands of Trump’s voter base of white evangelical Protestants, the only major Christian denomination in the U.S. in which a majority believes society has gone too far in accepting transgender people.
Since 2020, Trump has increasingly embraced Christian nationalism in his rhetoric and imagery. He’s sold Bibles, created a federal task force on anti-Christian bias, and been intrinsically linked to Project 2025, the 920-page plan calling for the establishment of a government imbued with “biblical principles” and run by a president who holds sweeping executive powers.
Experts say that “a strong authoritarian streak” runs through conservative Christianity. A 2023 study found that supporters of Christian nationalism tend to support obedience to authority and the idea of authoritarian leaders who are willing to break the rules. Nearly half of Christian nationalists support the notion of an authoritarian leader.
“They are trying to use the language of Christianity, but they are abusing it and misusing it constantly,” Rev. Chris Shelton, a gay pastor at the protest, told Uncloseted Media. “Our faith is all about reaching out to the marginalized, reaching out to the people who are ostracized by society and embracing them and offering love and welcome and a sense of dignity and worth. And to see any human being’s worth being denied is just a mockery of our faith.”
Heidi Beirich, the vice president and co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, says that “the LGBTQ community is the prime target of modern authoritarian regimes.”
“For Christian nationalists, attacking LGBTQ rights is the first pillar in destroying civil rights for all. This has happened in countries like Hungary and Poland as authoritarianism consolidated, and now it’s happening here,” Beirich told Uncloseted Media.
Moving Forward
As the country bleeds toward authoritarianism, LGBTQ protestors are encouraging people to use their voice, something the queer community is familiar with doing: One 2012 survey found that queer folks are 20 times more likely to be active in liberal social movements than their straight, cis counterparts.
“It is imperative that people continue to pay attention,” Short says. “There is so much going on, a lot of it is disturbing and intense, and there’s such a strong impulse to look away. But we have to engage in political action and resist inappropriate assertions of authority and continue to show up and vote for our democracy.”
17-year-old Zoe Boik is ready. She remembers being in second grade and crying the day after Trump won his first election in 2016. She couldn’t believe how he could lead the country despite “all the bad things he said.”
Boik can’t wait until the midterm elections, when she will be 18 and finally able to vote. “If we don’t vote, then our voices won’t be heard,” she says.
Despite this, she’s also concerned about her freedom to exercise that right being jeopardized.
“My fears about Trump don’t stem specifically from me being queer, but from his authoritarianism as a whole,” she says. “I am scared about how far he will move into dictatorship, [and] my biggest fear is that our right to vote will be compromised, leaving us no recourse.”
On Friday, the Trump administration began massive layoffs throughout the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). As part of that, they completely removed the Office of Population Affairs, which was responsible for a wealth of public health programs, including specific initiatives for the LGBTQ+ community.
“This wasn’t a budget decision — it was ideological,” a former member of the Biden administration told The Advocate. “These are the programs that centered reproductive and queer health, and now they’re gone.”
Donald Trump has welcomed the government shutdown as an opportunity to cut what he has called “Democrat Agencies” to shrink the government. The process is being led by Russ Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and key author of Project 2025, which advocated for such cuts. However, he has also tried to blame those government cuts on the Democrats.
Vought took to X/Twitter on Friday to announce the start of the “Reduction in Force,” or RIF. His office confirmed via Politico that federal employees were being permanently fired, not temporarily furloughed for the duration of the shutdown: “Can confirm RIFs have begun and they are substantial. These are RIFs, not furloughs.”
Adrian Shanker, who served as deputy assistant secretary for Health Policy during the Biden administration, told The Advocate that while the Office of Population Affairs often had its programs politicized, this is “the first time that the office itself is being cut.”
The Office of Population Affairs manages a huge range of public health initiatives. Those include Title X family planning services and grants; programs for adolescents that cover issues such as pregnancy prevention, mental health, and substance abuse; the Embryo Adoption Awareness and Services program; screenings and treatment for sexually transmitted infections and information on preventing the spread of HIV; and LGBTQ+ health initiatives, including information on gender-affirming care.
As well as restricting programming targeted specifically at the LGBTQ+ community, these cuts will restrict access to family planning programs that LGBTQ+ people are more likely to make use of to grow their families.
The cuts to the Office of Population Affairs will leave us lacking when it comes to sex education and with less support for LGBTQ+ youth, Shanker noted, saying it “leaves us more vulnerable to health inequities and worsened health outcomes.”
Wider cuts to the HHS will have broader effects as the CDC is losing over a thousand employees, including the elimination of entire departments. “CDC is over. It was killed,” said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the out gay former director of the CDC’s National Center on Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, after 1000 scientists, doctors, and public health officials were fired from HHS on Friday. Daskalakis, an infectious diseases expert, resigned in protest of the administration’s war on science-based public health earlier this year.
“This administration only knows how to break things. They have made America at risk for outbreaks and attacks by nefarious players. People should be scared.”
Previous federal layoffs have been litigated in court, with some resulting in court rulings that the people cannot be fired, while other courts have allowed the dismissals to proceed. That process, if it occurs here, will take time, during which public health will suffer a setback.
“Without these people in place, it’s unlikely that a lot of these programs will be able to continue even after the government reopens,” predicted Shanker.
Mark Bray, an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University who was nicknamed “Dr. Antifa” by students, left the U.S. for Spain Thursday night due to death threats he has received after he was accused of antifa membership.
The campus chapter of Turning Point USA and other conservative groups accused Bray of involvement with antifa and started a petition to get him fired, The Associated Press reported.
Bray has studied the history of the left and is considered an expert in anti-fascist movements but denies any involvement with antifa, which the Trump administration has labeled as a terrorist organization
“I am not now, nor have I ever been, part of any kind of antifascist or anti-racist organization – I just haven’t. I’m a professor,” Bray told The Guardian.
He took off on Thursday for Spain from Newark Liberty International Airport with his family, according to his social media, after initially being told his reservation had been canceled.
Conservative students labeled Bray a danger to campus.
“You have a teacher that so often promotes political violence, especially in his book ‘Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,’ which talks about militant fascism, which is on term with political violence,” student Megyn Doyle told Fox News.
The Hill has reached out to Rutgers for comment.
Conservatives said Bray donated to antifa when he committed 50 percent “of the author’s proceeds would go to the International Anti-Fascist Defense fund” from his 2017 book.
He countered those funds go “to help with the legal or medical costs of people facing charges for organizing pertaining to anti-fascism or anti-racism” and that the antifa group referenced does not have a centralized committee or leader, according to The Guardian.
Bray said the threats to him picked up with the petition and President Trump’s executive order to designate antifa as a terrorist group, prompting him to leave the country.
In his order, Trump said antifa is a “domestic terrorist organization” and gave the government authority to investigate anyone who provides “material support” to the group.
“Individuals associated with and acting on behalf of Antifa further coordinate with other organizations and entities for the purpose of spreading, fomenting, and advancing political violence and suppressing lawful political speech,” the order states. “This organized effort designed to achieve policy objectives by coercion and intimidation is domestic terrorism.”
When Bray first tried to leave the country with his family on Wednesday, they were not allowed on the plane and their reservation was canceled.
“‘Someone’ cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second,” Bray posted on Bluesky. “We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared.’”
The news he was trying to leave the country was first reported by NJ.com. The airline rescheduled them for the Thursday flight, which they successfully boarded.
Turning Point says it doesn’t support threats or doxing to any person, but students who have rallied in support of Bray are calling for its Rutgers chapter to be shut down.
“The Rutgers chapter of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) has been continuously promoting hate speech and inciting violence against our community. This disturbing behavior has created a toxic environment that has already led to tragic consequences,” a petition against the chapter reads.
The Hill has reached out to Turning Point for comment.
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