How the United States deport queer people to the countries that would kill them
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
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On a Tuesday morning in February, Ludovic Mbock walked into the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field office in Baltimore to renew his work permit. He had done this every year for nearly two decades, with the regularity of a man who understood that compliance was its own form of citizenship, even when the law said otherwise. He was thirty-eight, a competitive Street Fighter player, and he had lived in the United States since arriving from Cameroon as a teenager in 2002. He did not come out. ICE agents detained him on the spot. Within days he had been transferred through facilities in Louisiana and Georgia, pulled further each time from the life he had built in Oxon Hill, Maryland.
His sister, Diane Sohna, who was born in the United States, got the call hours later. ‘Yeah, ICE got me,’ he told her. He gave her some numbers to ring. Then the line cut.
Mbock is openly gay. Under Article 347-1 of Cameroon’s Penal Code, same-sex sexual activity carries a sentence of six months to five years. His attorney, Edward Neufville, was direct: ‘He won’t be able to survive in Cameroon.’ For years, the U.S. government had itself concluded it could not safely send him there. That calculation, evidently, has been revised.
There was no single executive order, no headline announcement. What arrived instead was architecture: bilateral agreements signed with foreign governments, procedural motions filed in immigration courts, the machinery of transfer and dismissal assembled across multiple federal agencies into a system capable of returning LGBTQ+ asylum seekers to countries where their identities are criminalised and, in several jurisdictions, punishable by death. Attorneys and advocates say the pattern has emerged through accumulation rather than announcement. Transfer agreements with foreign governments. Motions to dismiss asylum claims before a judge can hear them. And the quiet resumption of deportation flights to countries the United States does not formally recognise.
Rebekah Wolf, an attorney with the American Immigration Council who represents LGBTQ+ asylum seekers from multiple countries, told The Advocate that her organisation has identified a troubling consistency across immigration courts nationwide. ‘These are not isolated cases,’ she said. The same kinds of outcomes keep appearing regardless of jurisdiction.
Much of the alarm centres on Uganda. In May 2023, President Yoweri Museveni signed the Anti-Homosexuality Act into law, prescribing life imprisonment for consensual same-sex conduct and permitting the death penalty for ‘aggravated homosexuality’, a category whose sprawling definition takes in repeated same-sex acts, transmission of terminal illness, and sexual contact involving minors, the elderly, or persons with disabilities. The law also criminalises the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality, a provision wielded to justify arrests and suppress advocacy. Uganda’s Constitutional Court upheld the Act’s core provisions in April 2024, including the death penalty clause.
It was to this country that the United States, on 29 July 2025, signed a four-page Asylum Cooperative Agreementpermitting U.S. immigration authorities to transfer third-country nationals to Uganda for the examination of protection requests. The agreement, published in the Federal Register on 3 September, grants both sides discretion: the United States to propose transfers, Uganda to accept them. What it does not contain is any enforceable standard for evaluating claims, any requirement that Uganda recognise sexual orientation or gender identity as grounds for protection, or any independent mechanism to monitor what happens to a person once transferred.
‘All the agreement says is that we can send people to Uganda and Uganda will decide whether to protect them,’ Wolf said. ‘That is absurd on its face, and especially absurd for LGBTQ+ people.’
Wolf described cases involving LGBTQ+ asylum seekers from Morocco, among them a gay man in his late twenties and a transgender woman, whose claims were denied or delayed and who now face removal under third-country transfer policies. In the man’s case, government attorneys asked an immigration judge to dismiss his asylum claim without adjudicating it, citing Uganda as an alternative destination. He has been in U.S. immigration custody for more than a year; his hearings have been repeatedly postponed because the court cannot find an interpreter for the rare language he speaks.
For transgender asylum seekers, the situation is worse still. The Trump administration has publicly denied the existence of transgender identity as a legitimate federal category, and Wolf described how that denial filters into courtroom practice: scepticism about whether a claimant’s identity is ‘real,’ rigid interpretations of gender that leave no room for how people actually experience it. The administration has also rescinded longstanding protections for transgender detainees in ICE custody, permitting facilities to classify people strictly by the sex assigned at birth and to deny hormone treatment and individualised care.
Wolf also represents two gay Iranian men, romantic partners in their late thirties and early forties, whom the administration has sought to deport to Iran. Homosexuality there is punishable by flogging, imprisonment and death. The men were arrested in 2021 by Iran’s morality police for alleged homosexual conduct, released from custody while awaiting sentencing, and fled the country before punishment could be imposed. They crossed into the United States at the southern border in January 2025 to seek asylum.
A woman who had travelled with them was granted asylum after a forty-five-minute hearing; the government waived its right to appeal. The men’s cases went differently. Neither had legal representation during their hearings in late April and early May, and both were denied. ‘These are incredibly straightforward cases,’ Wolf said. ‘But our immigration courts, when there aren’t other eyes, can be really fraught with bias.’
By late summer, the government had quietly begun running removal flights to Iran, despite the absence of diplomatic relations with Tehran. One of the men received a temporary stay from the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals; the other did not. Both were transferred to southern Arizona, where roughly three dozen Iranian nationals had been gathered for a deportation flight. One might be sent to his death. The other might remain. They are a couple.
‘He’s saying, “Please, Ms Wolf, save my life,”’ she recounted.
These cases trace the outline of something larger. Over the course of the second Trump administration, the asylum system has been restructured to ensure that claims are processed out of existence. Asylum remains the law of the land; only Congress can repeal it. But it can be made inoperative. Detention periods stretch indefinitely while transfer agreements let the government argue that someone else should hear the case. Motions to pretermit, or dismiss, claims are filed before judges have looked at the underlying evidence. The right is not abolished. It is placed where nobody can use it.
Wolf described a system whose reliance on subjective credibility determinations disproportionately harms LGBTQ+ applicants. Judges evaluate claims through narrow frameworks, discounting testimony from people who do not use U.S.-centric language or whose understanding of their identity has evolved over time. ‘When you add baseline scepticism about asylum claims to bias against LGBTQ+ people,’ she said, ‘you get hearings that are invasive and legally unsound.’
Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, called the deportation practices ‘extraordinarily dangerous.’ He described a government ‘sending ICE agents to grab, detain, and immediately deport law-abiding gay and transgender people, who have committed no crimes,’ including to countries where being LGBTQ+ carries a death sentence. Minter called these deportations ‘the most severe and life-threatening harm being experienced by the greatest number of LGBTQ community members.’
David Stacy, vice president of government affairs at the Human Rights Campaign, placed the deportation threat in a wider context: the administration has cut safety programmes, weakened HIV-prevention funding, gone after non-discrimination protections. ‘No one should be returned to a country where they would face persecution for who they are,’ he said. ‘That’s just cruelty beyond belief.’
Wolf, who has practised immigration law for more than twenty years, said she worked through the first Trump administration and that what is happening now is different in kind. ‘We knew it was going to be bad. But we had no idea how bad.’ The administration tested where the law bent, she said, found where it broke, and kept going. ‘You can make asylum so unbearable and so impossible to access that, for all intents and purposes, it no longer exists.’
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin did not reply to questions from The Advocate on how the department weighs the risk of persecution or execution in these cases.
In Maryland, Ludovic Mbock’s gaming community has raised more than ninety-six thousand dollars for his legal defence. His sister speaks to him when the collect calls come through. He tells her he is fine, which is what people say when the alternative is a silence neither of them can hold. His friend Nikhil Delahaye, who has known him for over a decade through the competitive fighting game circuit, put it this way: ‘We can say a lot of things in terms of the American Dream. But when our actions aren’t consistent with that, what exactly is the objective?’
Wolf, who continues to pursue every legal avenue for her clients, said she believes the claims would succeed if they were heard on their merits. ‘If we can get a judge to actually look at the four corners of these asylum claims, we can win,’ she said. ‘The injustice here is stark. The problem is convincing the system to look.’
Somewhere in a detention facility in Georgia, a man who played Street Fighter at weekend tournaments and renewed his work permit every year waits to find out whether the country he has lived in for twenty-four years will send him to one where his existence is a criminal offence. His sister said he arrived in the United States at fourteen. He graduated from a Maryland high school in 2006. He has no criminal record. He walked into a government building to do what the government told him to do, and he did not walk out.
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