LGBT asylum: The experience
Ishalaa Serrano planted her feet on U.S. soil in August 2013, beginning another momentous transition.
Though getting here was perilous, the final steps across the threshold were simple. She walked up to a border guard in a dusty town straddling Mexico and the U.S called Tecate — like the beer — and presented herself as an asylum seeker.
Earlier that morning she quietly stole away from her home in nearby Tijuana for the last time, dashing out through her backyard and into a friend’s car parked nearby, all by cover of night. They drove east on a Baja California highway, away from Tijuana, towards the border crossing at Tecate.
“I was already living in the shadows for a week in my house because I was so afraid. I disconnected everything. I didn’t even turn on the television because I was afraid that if they knew that someone was inside something could happen to me,” said Serrano, who identifies as a transgender woman.
Today Ishalaa Serrano is an independent human rights activist and co-chairperson for TransLatina Coalition, a national organization that advocates for transgender Latino immigrants living in the U.S. She lives in New York City and works at an organic deli in Manhattan. Life, for Ishalaa, now seems comfortable.
But like many illegal Latino immigrants, her path to the U.S. was forged through violence and several unsuccessful attempts to cross the border.
She first made it across illegally in 2001, spending three “good” years in San Diego before her life suddenly came undone.
“I almost got killed by two guys that hit me in my head with a hammer,” said Serrano.
The attack, which she described as a hate crime, caused her to fall into severe depression. In an attempt to heal, she moved to Las Vegas, where she resided for a year she describes as “very hard.”
Straddling the lines between gender and country was a bewildering experience for Serrano, who began experimenting with women’s clothing as child. Firm in her identity as a transgender woman, it wasn’t self-doubt that caused her anguish. Rather, she says, it was persecution of transgender people in both countries that made her feel hopeless, and stateless.
“All that makes you feel like you cannot be in your own country, you cannot be in another because everywhere is the same bullshit against the transgender community,” she said.
With her depression unabated, Serrano returned home to Mexico in 2005.
Upon her return, she chose to focus on empowering transgender communities and fight fire with fire against what she describes as a hostile establishment in Baja California bent on subjugating transgender peoples.
While LGBT rights have expanded considerably in Mexico (Several states perform same-sex marriages.) transgender people are still targets of harassment, extortion, and violence.
A 2013 report by La Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos México (National Human Rights Commission of Mexico), noted a particularly high rate of violence against transgender Mexicans in educational institutions and penitentiaries. According to the findings, between 2009 and 2013, 91 homicides were motivated by homophobia or transphobia.
In the capital at least, transgender rights seem to be gaining traction. Last year, a trans-rights bill was approved in Mexico City allowing transgender people to change gender legally without a court order. Serrano isn’t hopeful the measure will be a big victory for transgender Mexicans though.
“The biggest change is that [transgender people] are not being persecuted anymore if you are a sex worker. That’s what we get in the transgender community, so actually it’s nothing,” said Serrano.
Back in Mexico, and increasingly involved in a trans-activism community in her state, Serrano said she became the target of local politicians in Tijuana. In 2012 she said she was threatened by a gubernatorial candidate for the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI), the official party of the current president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto.
“I appeared everywhere, having arguments and debates … As a strong leader in the LGBT community, I’ve been interviewed by the media,” she said.
According to Serrano, it was her outspoken criticism of the PRI candidate Fernando Castro Trenti and his anti-LGBT rhetoric in Baja California that caused him to lose the election.
“I had to run away because my life was in danger,” said Serrano, who described physical threats and intimidation from supporters following the candidate’s defeat.
And so after some Internet research, she chose to surrender herself at the U.S. border in 2013, on the grounds that her life was in danger and she was in need of political asylum.
But it wasn’t an arrival she was prepared for. Far from a warm welcome, Serrano spent two months in a federal detention center. She described her intake process into the facility as “horrible.”
She was met with hostile glares while being processed and after being strip-searched, she was assigned men’s clothing and put into a cell with other male detainees.
Sleep deprived, anxious, and with running makeup, Serrano said her only alternative was to note her gender orientation and be locked up in solitary confinement.
Serrano said her experience in a U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center belies the idea there is a difference between civil and criminal detention.
“You’re being treated like if you were a criminal, like at any time you are going to kill somebody … it is completely a prison. That simple,” she said.
Adding to her confusion and fear, Ishalaa was put into a van and moved to another facility during her time in detention. As ICE increasingly relies on contracts with privately-owned detention facilities, it has become common practice to transfer detainees to various jails, state prisons, and other facilities throughout the country in order to balance out populations.
Transgender detainees are dealt with wearily in detention centers, as they are thought to provoke a sexual response from straight detainees. Serrano said she took comfort in meeting a couple of gay detainees. After two months, she was released. A new life was presented to her.
Ishalaa relocated to New York City where she continues to work in trans-advocacy while also pursuing a passion for theater. As an activist, she continues to rally for social justices causes. On her down time she enjoys taking walks throughout the city and attending public events that celebrate the city’s diversity and multiculturalism.