In 2016, anti-LGBTQ+ extremists broke into the apartment of Bangladesh’s only LGBTQ+ magazine editor, Xulhaz Mannan, and murdered him and friend Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy. Tara Asgar was there, but she managed to escape. She needed to get out of Bangladesh. “I was a queer, gender-nonconforming person with no institutional protection, navigating state systems that were openly hostile toward people like me,” Asgar said, regarding immigration for LGBTQ+ people. “Leaving Bangladesh became less a decision and more a fight for survival.”

It was three difficult months before Asgar got a one-year visa to the United States. She fled to Maine. The move was complicated. It likely saved her life, but she was entering a country on the brink of electing Donald Trump after a presidential campaign based on hostility to immigrants, one that was starting to debate if transgender and gender-nonconforming people should be allowed in public spaces.

“The American discourse around trans rights was fracturing along partisan lines; visibility was increasing at the same time as backlash,” said Asgar. “This country is not a uniform ‘safe haven’ for queer or trans people. It is a place where safety is uneven and always entangled with race, class, immigration status, and geography. Visibility here carries its own risks.”

Accurate historical data on LGBTQ+ immigrants is scarce. Today, it is estimated that approximately 1.3 million queer immigrants live in the United States, and that 3 percent of all immigrants identify as LGBTQ+.

But immigration for LGBTQ+ people has never been easy. In fact, for most of American history, officials have used sexual orientation and gender identity to exclude large swaths of migrants.

The official ban on LGBTQ+ people migrating to the United States was struck down 35 years ago this month. But LGBTQ+ people remained largely blocked for the next four years due to homophobic laws and policy, according to Karma Chávez, professor of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Still, many LGBTQ+ people have held up the United States as a beacon of hope, regardless of anti-gay laws.

Read the full article about immigrating while queer by Kate Sosin at The 19th.