US Immigration issues first-ever guide, training on admitting "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex" immigrants

[Ed. note: this article is from an Immigration website that encourages LGBTI immigration to US] Recently, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued its first ever “Guidance for Adjudicating Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex (LGBTI) Refugee and Asylum Claims.” Following closely on the heels of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s historic speech at the United Nations where she declared that “gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights,” the Guidance heralds an unprecedented commitment to protecting the rights of LGBTI people fleeing persecution.

The Guidance is a training module and so its audience is first and foremost Asylum and Refugee officers. For this audience, the Guidance offers basic definitions of sexual orientation, gender identity, intersex condition, and HIV. It also sets expectations that the officers be sensitive to the difficult nature of these claims:

“Interviews with LGBTI or HIV-positive refugee and asylum applicants require the individual “to discuss some of the most sensitive and private aspects of human identity and behavior” – sexual orientation, gender identity, and life-threatening illness. These topics may be particularly difficult for applicants to discuss with government officials and may also be uncomfortable for the Interviewer to discuss.” Guidance at 11.

The Guidance also gives officers specific directions on how to interact with LGBTI applicants, such as telling officers to ask transgender applicants which pronoun and name they prefer to use, and using that preferred language during the interview. With specific examples of appropriate and inappropriate lines of questioning, the practitioner now has a concrete basis on which to seek a supervisor’s intervention if an officer asks inappropriate questions, such as graphic sexual questions.

In addition to describing how the asylum standard is applied in LGBTI cases, the Guidance explains some challenging scenarios which may arise in LGBTI cases and offers explanations. For example, the Guidance suggests that the mere fact that an applicant is or has been in an opposite sex marriage does not undermine the applicant’s credibility if he or she can explain the circumstances of the marriage. The Guidance also directs officers not to find applicants to lack credibility if they are unfamiliar with the same LGBTI terminology and culture that is common in the U.S. And the Guidance makes it clear that an officer may not rely on his or her own stereotypes of whether or not the applicant “looks gay” in determining whether the applicant would be singled out for harm in his or her country of origin. Guidance at 39-41.