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Carolina Ibarra clings to what hope she has left after fighting for nine years to gain asylum in the United States after an appeals court ruled against her.
The Mexican immigrant, who is transgender, says she is paralyzed by fear when she thinks she may be forced to return to her native country, from which she still carries painful memories.
“They make fun of you, they say things to you, bad words. They pushed me, they tried to assault me because of the way I was,” said the 43-year-old woman whose birth name is Juan Carlos Ibarra. “Always my physique was very feminine, my voice was very feminine, so for me it was very difficult to hide it.”
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Louisiana recently denied Ibarra asylum by affirming an earlier Board of Immigration Appeals decision that had denied him asylum in 2019. The board made that decision after a judge ruled against the Mexican national in October 2017.
The continued denials of her asylum request have left Ibarra “confused,” she said. For now, she continues to work evenings as a waitress at a restaurant in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and prays that her lawyer can negotiate with the U.S. government.
“I feel like someone punched me in the stomach,” said Rebecca Kitson, Ibarra’s attorney, after learning of the recent appeals court decision. “There aren’t many options left. We have a very limited toolbox right now for her.”
Ibarra, who was born in Durango and raised in a small town in that state, came to the United States in 1996, when she was 18, taking advantage of a sister and brother-in-law living in New Mexico.
“It was a way to escape. People like me get bullied a lot, there is a lot of discrimination,” he said.
Groups such as Human Rights Watch claim that in Mexico and other Latin American countries there have been important legislative advances in the defense of LGBT rights. However, that progress has been overshadowed by episodes of violence.
Cristian Gonzalez, the group’s LGBT rights researcher, listed recent acts of violence against LGBT people in Mexico City and in Mexican states near the U.S. border.
“In the latter there is a lot of anti-LGBT violence perpetrated not only by citizens but by criminal groups. Some target LGBT people particularly because they are more vulnerable and have fewer support systems,” Gonzalez said.
Human Rights Watch denounced in a report issued in 2020 that 138 Salvadorans deported by the United States to their home country since 2013 were killed after returning to El Salvador. Camila Díaz, a transgender Salvadoran, was one of them. In July 2020, a Salvadoran court sentenced three police officers to two decades in prison for Diaz’s murder.
The Fifth Circuit court affirmed the decision to deny asylum to Ibarra because it concluded that there was sufficient evidence of progress in terms of legal protections for LGBT people in Mexico.
After arriving in the United States, Ibarra began washing dishes in an Albuquerque hotel and studying English. Years passed and he gradually transformed his body into that of a woman. In 2011, however, she was detained at her home when immigration authorities went to arrest her roommate for living in the country without authorization and realized that Ibarra was in the same situation.
She spent a month in detention until a bail bond company released her.
After that, she began her asylum process in the immigration courts. That allowed her to obtain a temporary work permit and a social security number.
Now he wonders what the days hold for him because he doesn’t know what a life in Mexico would be like, where he doesn’t think he would be able to get a job. At the same time, he does not want to live in fear of deportation in the United States.
“I want to fight until the last minute. I already suffered a lot. I wouldn’t want to be hiding,” Ibarra said.
President Joe Biden’s administration has issued guidelines not to detain migrants just because they are living in the United States illegally. The administration says it focuses on detaining only those who commit crimes or are a danger to society.
Ibarra hopes not to have to return to the shadows.
“I couldn’t live happily like that. One mistake, one traffic stop and well, it all comes out,” he said.
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