#Refugee Asylum

[kavumas-blog]

My Life as a Queer Refugee: A Story of Struggle, Survival, and Hope

As a queer person, I once believed I could live authentically in my home country. But as I came out, everything changed. What I thought was a community that might support me turned against me, and I found myself in danger, rejected by family, friends, and society. Forced to flee my home to seek safety, I traveled to Kenya hoping for asylum, only to face even more hardship. Now, living in yet another country, I continue to struggle, not only with the trauma of being a refugee but with the daily fight to survive as a queer person.

My journey as a queer refugee has been one of immense pain and loss. When I left my country, I was running from violence—both physical and emotional. In Kenya, I hoped to find protection and safety, but what I encountered was indifference and exclusion. I wasn’t safe there either. Once again, I had to flee, moving to a neighboring country in search of refuge, but the discrimination followed me.

Living as a refugee is already incredibly difficult. The lack of basic necessities—food, medication, housing—is a constant strain. But being queer adds another layer of struggle. I often find myself isolated, marginalized by both the community I seek to integrate with and the very system that is supposed to protect me. There is no safety net, and the fear of violence or rejection is a constant presence in my life.

The systems in place often fail us. Many refugees are denied the support they desperately need, not because they aren’t worthy, but because their identities—especially their queer identities—make them vulnerable to further discrimination. The global refugee system has not yet adequately addressed the unique needs of LGBTQ+ refugees, and this is why the suffering continues.

What’s worse is that it’s not just about the physical survival—it's about the emotional toll it takes. Every day I fight to exist as myself, but too often, the world makes it feel like that’s a fight I can’t win. My story is not unique. There are countless queer refugees who face the same struggles of survival and the constant question: "Where can I go to be safe?"

But there is hope. This struggle is not just mine—it's shared by many, and it’s through awareness and action that we can make a difference. We need to advocate for better protections for queer refugees, for policies that take our unique struggles into account. We need organizations to provide not just shelter, but the mental and emotional support necessary for survival. And we need the wider public to open their hearts, understand our pain, and help us amplify our voices.

I urge you, if you’re reading this, to take action. Donate to my fundraiser. Advocate for policies that protect us, and raise awareness about the discrimination we face. Share our stories—let us be heard. The world must understand that queer refugees are not just statistics, but human beings fighting for the right to live openly and safely.

The fight is ongoing, but with support, it’s one we can win. I am more than my struggle, and together, we can ensure that every queer refugee has the chance to live without fear, to be themselves fully, and to survive with dignity.

[beauty-funny-trippy]

‘WHO VOTED FOR THIS?’ : TRUMP OBSTRUCTS CANCER RESEARCH FUNDING Trump has given orders to freeze ALL federally funded medical research in America. This includes research to treat: Cancer, Alzheimer's, Diabetes, Arthritis, Obesity, Drug Addiction, Depression, Childhood Leukemia, Heart Disease, etc. All of us know someone who is a afflicted with a medical condition that science is trying to cure, or at least lessen its severity. Who in their right mind would want to put a freeze on such important work? Notice Trump's priorities. He's not interested in lowering the cost of housing, or reducing middle and lower income Americans' taxes, or the price of groceries. Why? Because he's laser focused on more important stuff like: stopping life-saving medical research, worsening the climate crisis, reigniting inflation by mass deportations, increasing prescription drug prices, and of course, America's most urgent need of all — renaming the Gulf of Mexico. The man needs to have his head examined. Oh, ...darn. He just put a freeze on medical research into finding out what the hell is wrong with him!

[ceevee5]

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Immigration Minister Marc Miller says Palestinians who have fled Gaza will receive transitional financial assistance and supports after they arrive in Canada. The Immigration Department says the funds will help cover basic needs, such as shelter, food and clothing, with more details to be shared at a later date. The government also will offer temporary health coverage for three months, settlement services such as language training, and the ability to apply for study and open work permits without fees. The assistance will be available to Palestinians who fled the conflict in Gaza, regardless of whether they came to Canada via the special temporary immigration pathway for extended family or as regular temporary residents.

Continue Reading

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[graculusdraws]

[chamerionwrites]

President Biden issued an executive order on Tuesday that prevents migrants from seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border when crossings surge, a dramatic election-year move to ease pressure on the immigration system and address a major concern among voters.

The measure is the most restrictive border policy instituted by Mr. Biden, or any other modern Democrat, and echoes an effort in 2018 by President Donald J. Trump to cut off migration that was blocked in federal court.

In remarks at the White House, Mr. Biden said he was forced to take executive action because Republicans had blocked bipartisan legislation that had some of the most significant border security restrictions Congress had considered in years.

“We must face a simple truth,” said the president, who was joined by a group of lawmakers and mayors from border communities. “To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, we must first secure the border and secure it now.”

Aware that the policy raised uncomfortable comparisons, Mr. Biden took pains to distinguish his actions from those of Mr. Trump. “We continue to work closely with our Mexican neighbors instead of attacking them,” Mr. Biden said. He said he would never refer to immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country, as Mr. Trump has done.

Still, the move shows how drastically the politics of immigration have shifted to the right in the United States. Polls suggest there is support in both parties for border measures once denounced by Democrats and championed by Mr. Trump as the number of people crossing into the country has reached record levels in recent years.

The restrictions kick in once the seven-day average for illegal crossings hits 2,500 per day. Daily totals already exceed that number, which means that Mr. Biden’s executive order could go into effect right away — allowing border officers to return migrants across the border into Mexico or to their home countries within hours or days.

Typically, migrants who cross illegally and claim asylum are released into the United States to wait for court appearances, where they can plead their cases. But a huge backlog means those cases can take years to come up.

The new system is designed to deter those illegal crossings.

The border would reopen to asylum seekers only when the number of crossings falls significantly. The figure would have to stay below a daily average of 1,500 for seven days in a row. The border would reopen to migrants two weeks after that.

The American Civil Liberties Union said it planned to challenge the executive action in court.

“The administration has left us little choice but to sue,” said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer at the A.C.L.U, which led the charge against the Trump administration’s attempt to block asylum in 2018 and resulted in the policy being stopped by federal courts. “It was unlawful under Trump and is no less illegal now.”

There would be limited exceptions to the restrictions announced Tuesday, including for minors who cross the border alone, victims of human trafficking and those who use a Customs and Border Protection app to schedule an appointment with a border officer to request asylum.

But for the most part, the order suspends longtime guarantees that give anyone who steps onto U.S. soil the right to seek a safe haven.

The executive action mirrors the legislation that Republicans blocked in February, saying it was not strong enough. Many of them, egged on by Mr. Trump, were loath to give Mr. Biden a legislative victory in an election year.

“Donald Trump begged them to vote ‘no’ because he was worried that more border enforcement would hurt him politically,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said in a statement on Tuesday. He added: “The American people want bipartisan solutions to border security — not cynical politics.”

Immigration advocates and some progressive Democrats have expressed concern that Mr. Biden was abandoning his promise to rebuild the asylum system.

“By reviving Trump’s asylum ban, President Biden has undermined American values and abandoned our nation’s obligations to provide people fleeing persecution, violence, and authoritarianism with an opportunity to seek refuge in the U.S.,” said Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California.

Tuesday’s decision is a stark turnaround for Mr. Biden, who came into office attacking Mr. Trump for his efforts to restrict asylum. During a 2019 debate, Mr. Biden, then a candidate running against Mr. Trump for the first time, excoriated his rival’s policies.

“This is the first president in the history of the United States of America that anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country,” Mr. Biden said at the time.

[reasonsforhope]

“America likes to tell a certain story about itself: It’s a safe haven, a place of refuge for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. It’s a story that history shows hasn’t always been true. But thankfully, it just got easier for Americans to take matters into their own hands and turn that aspiration into a reality.

The Biden administration on January 19 launched the Welcome Corps, a new program that will allow groups of Americans to directly sponsor refugees to resettle in their communities.

Whereas recent programs have focused on bringing over people from specific places — Afghanistan, Ukraine, Venezuela — this program makes it possible for private citizens to resettle people from any place in the world, so long as they are refugees as defined by the US Refugee Act.

Under the Welcome Corps program, you and a few of your friends can pool together funds to provide an immigration pathway that allows vulnerable people who may not otherwise be able to immigrate the ability to rebuild their lives in the US. Forming a private sponsor group involves bringing together at least five adults in your area and collectively raising $2,275 for each person you want to resettle in your community. With that money, sponsors commit to helping them through the first three months there, which can include securing and furnishing housing, stocking the pantry with food, supporting job hunts, and registering kids for school.

It’s a powerful way to improve life for the newcomers, granting them protection from persecution or violence in their country of origin, plus the chance to access health care, education, and socioeconomic opportunities. It can also improve life for everyone who’ll be in the newcomers’ orbit, including you and your neighbors. Research suggests welcoming refugees will likely benefit your community as a whole, for example by opening new businesses that revitalize neighborhoods. In Canada, a similar private sponsorship program has proven immensely popular and successful over the past decade.

But you might be thinking: Why should it fall to private citizens to fork over the cash, time, and energy to resettle refugees? Shouldn’t that be the government’s job?

...It’s a fair point: This is the government’s job. That’s why the advocacy groups that pushed for the Welcome Corps program insisted that any refugees who come to the US via private sponsorship should be in addition to the number of traditional, government-assisted resettlement cases.

The State Department has signaled that it agrees. This means that by sponsoring a refugee, you can play a role in allowing the US to take in more refugees overall. It really is additive.

And unlike prior programs for Afghans or Ukrainians, which were temporary, ad hoc responses to crises, the Welcome Corps is intended to be a permanent fixture. The hope is that it’ll complement the traditional resettlement process, which has been struggling for years.”

-via Vox, 1/27/23

[stackslip]

As of yet, nations are not challenging the Refugee Convention directly, even as they move to scale back and even nullify its protections. In this environment, nations that sit between the world’s richest countries and its poorest and most war-torn can offer a valuable service as buffers and border guards. Every asylum-seeker that Greece pushes back is one that Germany never needs to worry about accommodating.

Though a climatically and politically unstable world does mean more refugees, the global attack on asylum is not a byproduct of overwhelming immigration. Japan, for example, tightened its policy in June by making it easier to deport asylum-seekers, although the restrictive country only awarded refugee status to 303 people in 2024, which was still a national record. A few hundred people in a population of over 100 million can’t pose any real burden on the country’s resources; the problem is with the principle that people are entitled to flee hardship and seek refuge. The goal is to whittle a right into a rare privilege.

To accomplish that, the West has to find ways to make seeking asylum even less appealing and more dangerous than the wars and disasters people are fleeing in the first place. Authorities must invent new cruelties to administer, cook up new nightmares to visit on the world’s most desperate. With their masks and knives and beatings, the Hellenic Coast Guard leads the way.

“There is a huge amount to learn from the Greek authorities and the Greek government in terms of the approach that they’ve taken towards illegal migration,” United Kingdom Home Secretary Suella Braverman told the press after a guided tour of coast guard operations on Samos, an island notorious for drift-backs. In April, the day after the U.K. passed a new policy that involves deporting asylum-seekers to Rwanda, five people drowned in the English Channel on their way to Britain, including a child.

As far as rich countries are concerned, these drownings are not a problem — they are a model policy solution. So if you want an image of the future, imagine a masked man kidnapping a child, putting her on a raft, and shoving it into the open sea, over and over and over again.

[onlytiktoks]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/01/20/trump-border-cbp-one-migrants/

In Spanish ↓

[beauty-funny-trippy]

JD Vance told a crowd that he will continue to describe Haitian residents in Springfield, Ohio, as “illegal aliens” even though they are in the country legally. The Republican audience gave him a round of applause for telling them lies. Why? Because even racists don't want to think of themselves as racist, so they search for any sort of justification (even a lie) for hating a group of people whose skin is a different color than their own. Which is why, even when immigrants are here legally, they still vilify them. So we know it's not about illegal immigration. It's about racism. Racism is what's driving the Republican Party right now. Don't believe me? Well, just imagine what would happen if none of the racists in America voted this November. Harris would win in a landslide.

[ceevee5]

[odinsblog]

Different red state, same old Republican bullshit.

Republicans and Ron DeSantis are on a mission to turn Florida into a shithole state with an oceanfront view.

[thebellekeys]

because i'm not an immigrant myself, nor are my parents for that matter, people seem to be comfortable casually saying things like "trump is lowkey right about immigration" and "close the borders" to me... like, fuck you?!

you and i are way more likely to become immigrants due to events and situations out of our personal individual control. you may want to instead hope you are never on the side of the door that gets slammed in the face when you most need a warm welcome someplace far from home.

immigration is one of the oldest phenomena in human history. the borders drawn up by nation-states are not. it has never been normal or natural to defend a legal document the way racists and xenophobes defend visas and passports. the country of one's origin has less to say about their values and behaviors than a hundred other signifiers. citizenship in this age of the nation-state's ideal of modernity is a scam.

[reasonsforhope]

"Fingers clinging to a crimp hold, eyes fixed determinedly on his goal, young Waleed (pictured above) scales the bouldering wall at The Climbing Hangar in Liverpool.  

Waleed was newly arrived in the UK from Sudan three years ago, when he became among the first to take part in Refugees Rock, then a fledgling project offering free climbing sessions to refugees and asylum seekers.  

It’s easy to imagine what might be going through his head. ‘Will I make it?’, perhaps, or ‘What happens if I fail?’ As a sporting metaphor for the challenges faced by refugees like him, climbing could not be more apt. 

“That feeling when people make it to the top for the first time and they look back down at you: they’re beaming and smiling because they’ve got there, and everyone’s cheering. It has a much deeper meaning than just climbing,” said Emma Leaper. Leaper is national coordinator with the Action Asylum initiative, which runs Refugees Rock alongside The British Red Cross and the Climbing Hangar.  

“It reflects the resilience of some of the people we’re working with, the journeys they’ve undergone and the fact that they’ve come all this way in the face of adversity.” 

Next month marks Refugees Rock’s third year in operation. Starting with just a handful of anxious newbies at The Climbing Hangar’s Liverpool branch, it now hosts hundreds of refugees and asylum seekers at 14 centres across the UK.  

Camaraderie is a huge draw. In a show of solidarity, local climbers have been recruited as volunteer ‘boulder buddies’ to show asylum-seeking newcomers the ropes, and extend a warm hand of friendship. 

“It’s just wonderful,” said Leaper. “You leave your problems behind. You’re not thinking about your asylum case, or the fact that you’re separated from your family and the trauma you’ve gone through – you’re thinking about the problem on the wall in front of you. 

“But the biggest difference I notice in people is in their confidence – up on that wall, they’re basically finding themselves again.”"

-via Positive.News, March 27, 2024