Williams Institute reports impact of deportations on LGBTQ immigrants

Williams Institute at UCLA has released its latest report, highlighting the intersection between LGBTQ and immigration issues and the impact of the U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) raids across Los Angeles. 

According to the brief, LGBTQ immigrants who hold legal status but who are not naturalized citizens may also face challenges to their legal right to reside in the U.S. 

Recent reports indicate that non-citizens with legal status are being swept up in immigration operations and several forms of legal status which were granted at the end of the Biden administration are being revoked. Those include Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for some Venezuelan immigrants, as well as those from Afghanistan and Cameroon, while Haitian nationals are now facing shortened protection periods by up to six months. 

The Justice Department has proposed a new rule which grants the government border authority to revoke green card holders’ permanent residency status at any time. This rule is currently under review by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which could significantly affect non-citizens who are currently documented to reside in the county legally. 

Los Angeles County Supervisorial District 1, under Supervisor Hilda L. Solis, and Supervisorial District 2, under Supervisor Holly J. Mitchell would be particularly affected as they contain the city center of Los Angeles and nearly 29,000 LGBTQ noncitizens who would face the harshest impact. Those two districts represent many of the county’s historically Black, Latin American and Asian/Pacific Islander neighborhoods. 

For transgender, nonbinary and intersex immigrants arrested or detained by ICE, there are additional impacts regarding how federal law defines biological sex and gender identity. The Trump administration has signed an executive order which redefines “sex” under federal law to exclude transgender, gender-diverse, and intersex (TGI) individuals. This adds an extra thick layer of possible violence when TGI individuals are placed in detention centers or in holdings that does not correspond to their identity.

According to the report,transgender, non-binary, and intersex immigrants must navigate an

immigration and asylum system without information about how federal agents will respond to their gender identity and with the risk of greater violence if placed in detention centers, given the effects of this executive order.”

The brief estimates the number of foreign-born adults in Los Angeles County who will be potentially affected by the Trump administration’s executive orders on mass deportations. 

Using previous data from other Williams Institute Studies, reports from the University of Southern California Dornsife Equity Research Institute and data from the Pew Research Center, the latest brief states that there are over 1.35 million LGBTQ-identifying people across the U.S., with 30% of them residing in California. 

The report further points to 122,000 LGBTQ immigrants who reside within L.A. County specifically, making Los Angeles County home to about 10% of all LGBTQ adult immigrants in the U.S. 

While 18% of those Angelenos are foreign-born, only around 7%, or 49,000 of them, do not hold legal status. 

Using research from the Pew Center and applying an estimate, that means that there are approximately 23,000 undocumented LGBTQ across L.A. County and the remaining 26,000 LGBTQ immigrants in the county have some form of legal status. 

Among the LGBTQ population of adult immigrants in California, approximately 41,000 are transgender or nonbinary. That figure also points toward approximately 5,200 of them residing in L.A. County. According to the proportions applied for this estimate, the Williams Institute approximates that around 3,100 transgender and nonbinary immigrants in L.A. County are naturalized citizens, over 1,100 have legal status and just under 1,000 are undocumented. 

According to a brief, released in February by the Williams Institute, “mass deportations could impact 288,000 LGBTQ undocumented immigrants across the U.S.”