Audu Kadiri worked as an LGBTQ+ community health advocate in Nigeria until 2014. Then, his country’s government passed the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA), a law criminalizing same-sex relationships and anyone who supports an LGBTQ+ organization with up to 14 years of imprisonment. Soon after, Kadiri and his fellow queer activists began receiving threats and verbal attacks.

“One thing in Nigeria is they call it ‘jungle justice,’ whereby people take laws into their hands,” Kadiri said. “And the government would even stand by and watch it… the police, the law enforcement agents, they don’t do anything. And even if you go to the police station to report a case as a gay man, they turn it against you.”

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Kadiri moved and became one of the estimated 5 million Black immigrants and refugees currently living in the U.S. and one of the estimated 639,000 immigrants in the country who identify as LGBTQ+.

Asylum seekers in the U.S. don’t have a right to representation in immigration court and can legally be held indefinitely in immigrant detention centers. Upon release, a court may not grant them a work authorization, leaving them unable to support themselves financially, says Oluchi Omeoga, the transgender co-founder and co-executive director of the Transgender Law Center’s (TLC) Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project (BLMP), a group that Kadiri helped co-organize.

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Fleeing their homelands —and possibly the only family or community they’ve ever known — many new migrants must either live in shelters or remain homeless until they can find more permanent housing, Omeoga tells LGBTQ Nation.

Health care, which is difficult even for American citizens to obtain, is doubly so for migrants, he adds, and even harder for trans and gender-expansive immigrants facing new federal and state restrictions on gender-affirming healthcare.

“On top of that, asylum-seeking legal processing fees are not cheap,” Omeoga says. Refugees must pay $1,000 annually to keep their application active, and the process can take years.

“For… folks that are coming here with little to nothing,” Omeoga says, “that’s almost impossible.”

And this is all before one even factors in queerness or Blackness.

Healing the racist & queerphobic scars of colonialism

The transatlantic slave trade created a socioeconomic legacy of violent and exploitative anti-Black racism that continues to affect enslaved people’s modern-day descendants, Omeoga says. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, Britain colonized 53 countries, including 20 African countries and 13 Afro-Caribbean island nations. Britain exploited their workforces, destabilized their economies, and instituted racist, homophobic laws — many of which remain to this day, even in territories that have since declared independence from Britain.

Conservative Christians – sometimes from the U.S. – foster anti-LGBTQ+ hostility and legislation in these countries. When migrants flee to the United States, fellow immigrants from other predominantly Christian and Muslim African countries may continue to shun or demonize them, Omeoga adds, leaving them to “fight for the same scraps” as African-Americans in the U.S. who are already struggling to survive against institutionalized racism.

On a daily basis, local, state, and federal authorities subject Black immigrants to hyper-surveillance, racial profiling, and bias in criminal law as well as in immigration enforcement and outcomes, BLMP said in its 2018 video entitled “Coming Home.”

“Nearly one in five Black immigrants lives below the poverty line and the group have the highest unemployment rates amongst all immigrant groups. Every day, anti-Black racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia all threaten the lives of Black LGBTQ+ immigrants,” BLMP added. “This discrimination creates severe barriers to accessing and receiving critical services.”

Because the Black queer immigrant community is so small and marginalized, newly arrived migrants can feel isolated, especially in rural areas and states like Idaho or Montana, Omeoga says. The discrimination and lack of peers with similar identities can discourage queer migrants from coming out or expressing their true selves.

Omeoga’s parents, who immigrated from Nigeria in the 1980s, initially told him that Nigerians aren’t queer, so if he felt queer, then he “couldn’t” also feel Nigerian. As a result, Omeoga felt inhibited about expressing their queer identity. But over time, Omeoga’s engagement with Minneapolis’ Nigerian community, through BLMP and other social justice organizing, gradually compelled their parents to reconsider how they interacted with their now visibly trans child within their cultural community.

When BLMP was launched in December 2017, many of its co-founders were already organizing in other Black, immigration, and social justice groups like the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), and the Black Lives Matter Network.

BLMP’s co-founders realized that, even though queer or immigrant groups mutually acknowledged the criminalization of immigrants and the queerphobic discrimination they face, no spaces existed within these groups to specifically acknowledge Black queer immigrants’ unique intersectional identities or their distinctive social challenges.

Most immigration activist groups and conversations focus on non-Black Latinx people for two reasons, according to Omeoga: because of the United States’ shared southern border with Central and South America, and from sensationalized U.S. media coverage largely centered on racist Republican claims of violent Latinx gangsters and drug dealers “invading our borders.”

As a result, Black immigrants get erased and disregarded from the discussion, as does the fact that much Black queer migration is due to Western imperialism, Omeoga says.

A group that would later evolve into BLMP met during September 2016 in Oakland, California, and had a convening during January 2017 before the start of the 2017 LGBTQ Taskforce’s annual conference, Creating Change in Washington, D.C. There, about 30 Black queer immigrants and first-generation children discussed their personal stories, the spiritual effects of their current situations, their hopes for building communties, as well as ways to help one another thrive in addition to the groups already providing helpful services for them, Omeoga says.

The group asked attendees from across the country to band together, create localized hubs, and build membership by offering programs that help Black queer immigrants feel less isolated and more empowered. The hubs hold community-building events — like dinners and game nights — provide legal support for immigration purposes, offer leadership training, help with regional organizing through protests and networking events, facilitate access to social services, and conduct surveys focused on Black queer immigrant experiences.

BLMP now has around 300 members in 10 areas nationwide, including New York City, Washington D.C., Minneapolis, Houston, Atlanta, Mississippi, and New Orleans, as well as regional groups in California, North Carolina, and the Pacific Northwest.

The group also partners with the Transgender Law Center, Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement; the Refugee Health Alliance; Casa Arcoiris (Rainbow House); and Jardin de Mariposa (Garden of Butterflies) for TLC’s border Butterfly Project, which provides humanitarian and legal support to LGBTQ+ migrants of any race who are stuck at the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego.

The need for groups like BLMP has become even more urgent

On January 20, the U.S. president issued an executive order entitled “Realigning the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP).” The order effectively ended the USRAP program, which has helped relocate millions of refugees in the U.S. since its creation in 1980. It also halted refugee admissions indefinitely and froze millions in congressionally appropriated USRAP funding, stranding thousands of refugees who had already been approved to reside in the U.S., and effectively shuttering local and state-level groups that provided vital survival benefits.

Last June, the administration also placed a full travel ban on visitors from seven African countries and a partial ban on visitors from two others. The White House is considering additional bans on visitors from at least 29 other African or Afro-Caribbean countries. The president plans to give preferred relocation assistance to white, English-speaking South Africans and Europeans who fled their countries after making bigoted racial statements or supporting political parties that oppose immigration.

“We as people here who have been privileged to be here,” Kadiri said at BLMP’s September 2016 organizing meeting. “How do we pool resources together? How do we come together to strategize and address these issues that make people leave these places to come here? And how do we ensure that those who are already here are able to navigate services and remain safe? These are part of the issues we are trying to address as a group.”

Jonathan Jayes-Green — a co-founder of the Undocu Black Network, who personally attended the September 2016 convening — said that ultimately, BLMP wants to build a place where Black queer immigrants aren’t seen as disposable.

The U.S. treats undocumented people and Black trans people, especially, as meaningless quotas. But rather the opposite is true, Jayes-Green said — their lives are valuable and worthy of protection, dignity, and humanity.

“You don’t have to fight for that in this space,” he said. “We know, as directly impacted people, that that’s the case.”

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