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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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 15,000 individuals since their founding, including over 1,500 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.

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’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 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 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.”

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