World Refugee Day ’24: For a World Where ALL Refugees Are Welcomed

“For a World Where Refugees Are Welcomed” is the aspirational theme for this year’s World Refugee Day. Every June 20^th, we are reminded of the resilience and courage of those forced to flee their homes, whether due to war and strife, climate catastrophes, poverty and hunger, or persecution.

Each World Refugee Day, we renew our solidarity to ensure that refugees not only survive but thrive, in safety and in dignity. We do so in a world where there are now more than 117 million forcibly displaced persons — a jump of nine million persons in just one year — according to the UNHCR, the U.N. Refugee Agency.

This work is especially urgent for LGBTQI+ refugees escaping abusive families, government discrimination, and violence from a broad range of non-state actors. Consensual same-sex relations remain criminalized in roughly 65 countries. Even after fleeing their families and communities of origin, LGBTQI+ refugees and asylum seekers face dramatically higher rates of violence, sexual assault, extortion, and other mistreatment from law enforcement and border security forces, from organized crime syndicates, and even from other refugees.

CGE members and partners have long documented these dangers, from LGBTQI+ shelters along the U.S.-Mexico border to the sprawling refugee camps in Kenya. Nor do these dangers end upon reaching the United States: a new report this week from Immigration Equality, Human Rights First, and the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) revealed the systemic abuse of LGBTQI+ and HIV+ individuals detained in ICE and CBP facilities. Such abuses include physical and verbal attacks, sexual assault and sexual harassment, denial of health care, solitary confinement, and inadequate access to legal representation.

On this World Refugee Day, the situation for LGBTQI+ refugees seeking safety and asylum in the United States is growing increasingly perilous.

Amsterdam, the Netherlands, August 6 2022: Amsterdam Pride 2022 Canal Parade

First, some good news. To its credit, the Biden Administration has made critical improvements in rebuilding the overall refugee resettlement infrastructure gutted by the Trump Administration — and that Trump and his allies promise to completely eviscerate should they return to power. These improvements include restaffing refugee programs and restoring resources devastated by his predecessor. With just over 55,000 refugees admitted to the United States in the first seven months of FY24, there is a plausible chance of meeting the Biden Administration’s target goal of 125,000 admissions for the year. (For perspective, the four-year total under the previous administration was roughly 64,000.)

And just this week, President Biden announced a legal pathway to citizenship for 500,000 undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, one of the most dramatic acts to protect immigrants since the since the enactment of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) during the Obama Administration.

Perhaps the pride of the Administration’s efforts to rebuild refugee system is its Welcome Corps program, which seeks to harness the power of community sponsorship to support refugee resettlement. Small groups sponsor an individual refugee, helping new arrivals find housing and employment, enroll in English classes, access benefit programs, and begin building their new communities in the United States. In its first year, sponsors welcomed nearly 100 refugees — modest numbers to start, to be sure, but those numbers obscure the massive effort by our colleagues at State, by officially recognized Private Sponsors Organizations such as Rainbow Railroad, and by hundreds of volunteers to build and test new resettlement systems and ensure that the first refugees all thrived upon arriving in the United States.

Rainbow Railroad, building on its pioneering private sponsorship partnership with the Canadian government, has been organizing Welcome Corps sponsorship groups to resettle LGBTQI+ refugees in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and other U.S. communities. The Washington Blade covered the resettlement of “Xander,” a queer man from El Salvador who arrived in D.C. in November 2023. He left his home country fearing for his life after enduring ongoing verbal abuse and discrimination after a neighbor beat his mother and grandmother, and knowing that no law or police officers would protect him.

Xander has thrived since coming to Washington — as have several gay refugees from Venezuela who arrived this spring via sponsorship from local Rainbow Railroad groups, including one organized by CGE’s Ian Lekus. In that case, the newcomer found employment almost immediately, followed a few weeks later by a terrific housing opportunity, and earlier, this month, he got to celebrate his first massive Pride event.

Capital Pride, June 2024. Photo by Ian Lekus

However, through our work to support Welcome Corps, Rainbow Railroad and other CGE members advocating for refugee resettlement have discovered a major policy gap: the U.S. government does not track which refugees are LGBTQI+-identified. This poses a tremendous challenge to connecting queer refugees with either Welcome Corps or other resettlement pathways. Our members continue to call for fundamental changes to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) to ensure that self-declared queer refugees are identified in the admissions system, tracked, and receive LGBTQI+-sensitive resettlement and support services, including full protection of their confidentiality.

So, nearly four years of work to rebuild the refugee system are starting to pay off, and even longer campaigns to make U.S. refugee resettlement mechanics more responsive to the urgent needs of LGBTQI+ people are just beginning to bear fruit. That’s the good news this World Refugee Day.

The bad news comes starting with President Biden’s Executive Order earlier this month that effectively shuts down the U.S.-Mexico border and dramatically limits the right to claim asylum at the southern border — thus breaking with the longstanding guarantee of that right to anyone who steps onto U.S. soil. The Executive Order effectively reinstitutes Trump’s asylum ban while conceding to the Republican demands in the border security bill from earlier this year that far-right extremists in the House blocked from passage in order to help the Trump campaign.

Amnesty International USA, Human Rights First, Immigration Equality, IRAP (the International Refugee Assistance Project), and Rainbow Railroad — all CGE member organizations — have all forcefully condemned Biden’s June 4^th Executive Order.

Steve Roth from ORAM (Organization for Refuge, Asylum, and Migration) explained that the Executive Order will harm “LGBTIQ asylum seekers and other vulnerable individuals seeking refuge from persecution.” It will also “put more LGBTIQ asylum seekers in harm’s way in dangerous Mexican border towns and puts added pressure on refugee-serving organizations throughout Mexico.” Christina Asencio of Human Rights First added how the Executive Order will “endanger LGBTQI+ people seeking asylumby requiring them to wait months in Mexico to obtain a CBP One appointment where they face acute risks of anti-LGBTQI+ persecution and suffer kidnappings, sexual assault, and other harms due to their sexual orientation, gender identity, race, language, and nationality.”

IRAP’s Hannah Flamm condemned the Executive Order as “disgraceful political theater,” and Immigration Equality’s Bridget Crawford concurred, noting, “President Biden is playing craven political games with the lives of refugees, including LGBTQ people fleeing persecution, instead of implementing workable solutions.”

Crawford continued, declaring, “For queer and trans asylum seekers, asylum is a critical lifeline. LGBTQ people are persecuted around the globe for being who they are. During Pride month the President should be proclaiming his commitment to protect LGBTQ refugees and upholding his promise to them, not enacting policies that will result in the preventable persecution, torture, and death of queer and trans asylum seekers.”

Indeed, seeking asylum is a human right. LGBTQI+ individuals seeking refuge in the United are fleeing criminalization, discrimination, and violence. This unlawful ban violates U.S. and international refugee laws, endangers LGBTQI+ people at risk seeking safety at the border, and breaches the 2021 Presidential Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons Around the World. This will leave queer and trans refugees in danger without a viable means of finding refuge and vulnerable to being sent back to life-threatening circumstances.

Let’s be clear here: this Executive Order is catastrophic for LGBTQI+ asylum seekers and other asylum seekers from vulnerable populations — and it’s highly unlikely to help move the electoral needle. The EO is grounded in false narratives about border invasions and enacts exclusionary policies based on white supremacist thinking. It does so at a time when there are more forcibly displaced people in the world than at any other time in recorded history, when we need concrete, LGBTQI+-inclusive solutions that uphold human rights and create secure pathways to safety.

The Biden Administration must do better.

Of course, as we push the Biden Administration to reaffirm its commitment to refugee rights and abandon the politics of fear, we must also organize vigorously against the xenophobic, homophobic and transphobic, and comprehensively authoritarian plans of the Trump campaign and the far right. Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation-led Presidential Transition Plan for the next conservative administration — represents an existential, Christian Nationalist, “post-Constitutional” threat to multiracial, pluralistic democracy. Project 2025 takes direct aim at both LGBTQI+ people — especially transgender people — and immigrants, as well as sexual and reproductive health and rights, racial equity, climate change mitigation, a professional civil service, and even the basic rule of law. The plan demonizes immigrants as a crime-ridden plague, promising the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants, sprawling internment camps, and effectively eliminating asylum for those facing social persecution.

So, this World Refugee Day, we must reaffirm our commitment to building a world where all refugees are welcomed — regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, sex characteristics, or any other status subjecting them to violence and persecution. And we must redouble our defense of democracy to ensure the safety, security, and dignity of all who are vulnerable.

Global Equality Today: March 2024

As we write here in Washington, D.C., spring has arrived. Clocks have sprung forward, cherry blossoms have just peaked, and pollen allergies are back with a vengeance.

Temperatures aren’t the only thing heating up, though. While it’s only March, we’re effectively moving onto the general election season months before the summer conventions following barely contested primary races in both major parties.

Any election year offers distinct advocacy challenges, but never have we seen one so fraught as this year, where Congress is paralyzed by the extraordinary dysfunction within the House Republican majority. One example of the extremist-driven paralysis comes in the continuing failure to pass a five-year “clean” reauthorization of PEPFAR, despite the program’s extraordinary success and its twenty-year record of bipartisan support. Fortunately, Congress did just approve a clean, one-year extension of the program in its late-night budget deal. That’s not ideal for program management, but we did manage to keep some dangerous riders out of PEPFAR that would have undermined its effectiveness — and its ability to serve LGBTQI+ communities abroad. 

But we continue to work with our allies in the executive branch and on the Hill to promote LGBTQI+ human rights wherever possible. Just this month, CGE members successfully lobbied Congressional allies to strip more than 50 anti-LGBTQI+ riders from the Appropriations bill. The anti-LGBTQI+ forces in Congress did manage to attach one unfortunate provision that is intended to prevent embassies from flying Pride flags during Pride celebrations overseas. But CGE member Human Rights Campaign summed up the situation well, noting in a press release that it was one of the least-harmful of all of the anti-LGBTQI+ provisions and that it does not in any way prevent embassies from actually celebrating Pride.

Indeed, with this new limitation, we challenge the majority of U.S. embassies that do celebrate Pride around the world to rethink their celebrations to move beyond flag-waving events to gatherings designed to honor and support the community in creative new ways. For its part, a White House statement promised to work with Congress to repeal the policy. CGE and our members will remain vigilant, as no doubt, hard-right members of Congress will continue to try inserting anti-LGBTQI+ poison pills into other bills as this increasingly dysfunctional Congress wraps up its pre-election agenda.

PROJECT 2025, LGBTQI+ HUMAN RIGHTS, AND THE AUTHORITARIAN THREAT

It is no exaggeration to say that democracy is on the ballot in 2024, in the United States and around the world. Two billion people — about half of the world’s adult population — will go to the polls this year. Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist from the Philippines and author of How To Stand Up to a Dictator, has warned that in all likelihood, “2024 will be the year that democracy falls off the cliff.”

Very dramatic words to be sure, but in Indonesia, a former general once banned from the United States for alleged human rights abuses has already won the February presidential election. In Russia, Vladimir Putin used sham polls to further tighten his grasp on power. In India, Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist prime minister, is widely expected to win a third term in this spring’s elections. Other key elections coming this year include those taking place in Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, Belgium, Ghana, the European Union, and, potentially, the United Kingdom.

In an op-ed last month, Maria Sjödin, Executive Director of Outright, one of CGE’s member organizations, outlined the implications of these elections for LGBTQI+ people, noting the weaponization of homophobia and transphobia in the campaigns in Russia, Ghana, and South Africa, among other countries.

This weaponization is, of course, front and center in this year’s U.S. presidential, Congressional, and local elections. At CGE, we are working hard to draw attention to Project 2025.

If you haven’t yet heard, Project 2025 is what the Heritage Foundation and its partners are innocuously pitching as “the plan for the next conservative President” of the United States. But as our colleagues at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism explain far more accurately, “Project 2025 is an authoritarian roadmap to dismantling a thriving, inclusive democracy for all.”

We strongly encourage you to read our blog on Project 2025, and to share it, along with our fact sheet on the particular anti-LGBTQI+ planks of the plan. Additionally, check out Beirne Roose-Snyder, CGE’s Senior Policy Fellow, talking about Project 2025 on the rePROs Fight Back podcast.

Beyond demonizing LGBTQI+ people and looking to eliminate the fundamental human rights of the community, Project 2025 takes aim at numerous rights, populations, programs, and principles: sexual and reproductive health and rights, racial equity, climate justice and environmental policy, public education, so-called “wokeness” in the military, separation of church and state, and much more.

Let’s not mince words: Project 2025’s targeting of LGBTQI+ people and of sexual and reproductive health and rights is inseparable from its overarching goal of dismantling democracy and capturing the U.S. federal government. It is no exaggeration to describe Project 2025’s mandate as eliminationist, as it seeks to erase LGBTQI+ people from public life, from social protections, and from democratic citizenship altogether.

The Republican House majority has certainly demonstrated its willingness to pursue such an eliminationist agenda, as have anti-LGBTQI+ state legislators around the country. The one partial victory they achieved in the appropriations battle was enacting a ban on flying the rainbow flag on the exterior of U.S. embassies — though, as already noted, that measure does not limit embassies organizing Pride events or otherwise supporting in-country LGBTQI+ communities. But this provision also speaks to how authoritarians, at home and around the globe, have weaponized the rainbow flag in their war on democracy and the rule of law.

Over the months to come, we’ll have much, much more to say about Project 2025 and about the highly coordinated, very well-funded anti-rights movement that is targeting LGBTQI+ rights as a wedge for its broader assault on democracy, civil society, and human rights.

LGBTQI+ REFUGEES & ASYLUM SEEKERS

In February, House Republicans defeated the border security deal negotiated between the White House and a bipartisan group of Senators. While there were certainly some positive measures in the deal, from increased staffing to process asylum claims to urgently needed assistance for Ukraine, and while House Republicans rejected the deal for not being sufficiently anti-immigrant, we expressed our fundamental opposition to any changes to immigration policy that would undermine the basic human right to seek asylum and that certainly would be disastrous for LGBTQI+ refugees and asylum seekers.

We want to flag two related pieces from CGE members. First, in an op-ed in The Advocate, Immigration Equality issued its own powerful rebuke to the deal, explaining why it would be lethal for LGBTQI+ asylum seekers. Second, Human Rights First reported on a trip to the U.S.-Mexico border, sharing the stories of refugees directly harmed by U.S. policies, including that of an LGBTQ+ refugee from Ghana terrified of being forced to return — and this was even before the passage of the horrific anti-LGBTQI+ law by the Ghanaian Parliament in late February.

LGBTQI+ HUMAN RIGHTS UNDER THREAT AROUND THE WORLD

Ghana is one of all too many countries where homophobic and transphobic politicians, backed by anti-rights actors from the United States, are pushing discriminatory, hate-fueled legislation to deny even the most basic rights of citizenship to LGBTQI+ people. These laws, whether proposed or actually passed and enacted, all increase anti-LGBTQI+ stigma and violence.

CGE is coordinating closely with activists in Ghana urging President Akufo-Addo to veto the draconian bill passed by Parliament in February; with movement leaders in Uganda petitioning for the Supreme Court there to overturn last year’s Anti-Homosexuality Act; and with advocates in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa working hard to prevent passage of similar bills in their own country.

We also continue to lobby our partners in the U.S. government, at the World Bank, and in like-minded countries to keep up the pressure and not let homophobic and transphobic politicians think they can get away with restricting the fundamental human rights of a vulnerable community. CGE especially appreciates the termination of Uganda’s AGOA status and calls for Ghana’s status to be revoked as well should the new law go into effect. We were also very pleased to see the Treasury Department levy sanctions against the director of Uganda’s prison system:

“Members of vulnerable groups, including government critics and members of Uganda’s LGBTQI+ community, have been beaten and held without access to legal counsel; for example, in a 2020 case, the UPS [Uganda Prisons Systems] denied a group of LGBTQI+ persons access to their lawyers and members of the group reportedly endured physical abuse, including a forced anal examination and scalding.”

This is only the second-known use of Global Magnitsky Act sanctions against a perpetrator for committing human rights violations against LGBTQI+ people, a strategy CGE has long urged Treasury to deploy. We likewise applaud the denial of a visa to Ugandan MP Sarah Opendi (and apparently to many other Ugandan MPs), who called for the castration of gay men and who has been one of the leading supporters of the Anti-Homosexuality Act.

For a deeper dive into the homophobic and transphobic campaigns across the Continent, we encourage you to read our think piece, “Ubuntu for LGBTQI+ Africans,” which argues:

The proliferation of anti-LGBTQI+ laws in Africa constitutes a perilous trend that imperils the lives and freedoms of countless individuals, placing the continent at a disadvantage. These laws contravene fundamental human rights principles, while also undermining democracy and the rule of law. It is imperative that African governments take decisive action to repeal these harmful and discriminatory laws while actively promoting equality and human rights for all.

Meanwhile, Russia continues to push the template for authoritarian regimes using eliminationist tactics as a tool promote the broader suppression of dissent and independent civil society. Building upon the 2013 and 2022 so-called “propaganda” laws, the Russian Supreme Court declared “the international LGBT movement” to be “an extremist organization,” thus conflating any pro-LGBTQI+ statements with terrorism. Already, one woman has been jailed for wearing rainbow earrings under the new court ruling, and earlier in March, two employees of a gay bar were charged with “extremism” for organizing and hosting drag shows. CGE is continuing to partner with Russian LGBTQI+ activists to draw attention to the crisis facing the country’s queer community, and we are urging U.S. government partners to use all tools possible to prevent copycat legislation in other countries as was the case for the “propaganda” laws.

In Central Asia, the Biden Administration is seeking to develop closer security partnerships and economic relationships with the five former Soviet republics strategically located between Russia, China, and Afghanistan. As it does so, we continue to press our Administration partners to insist that improving the abysmal situation for LGBTQI+ people and for human rights and civil society more broadly in Central Asia must go hand-in-hand with closer trade ties.

THE WAR IN GAZA AND ISRAEL

More than five months since the catastrophic attacks of October 7^th, CGE continues to mourn the pain and suffering from those brutally victimized by Hamas, as well as the Palestinian civilians who have been harmed and killed in the Israeli response. We call out all attacks on civilian populations as grave violations of human rights and humanitarian law.  

We further call on the U.S. government to support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Israel, and to support sufficient and unhindered humanitarian corridors to Gaza to prevent greater harm to civilians. We urge the United States to ensure that U.S. military and financial support are not used for the collective, retaliatory punishment of Palestinians, including journalists, children, and other vulnerable groups. We also call on the U.S. government to work for a negotiated release of all the hostages currently in Gaza as an immediate priority. 

CGE Co-Chair Julie Dorf published her own personal reflections on the war, having grown up in a “staunchly Zionist environment,” visiting Israel and Palestine numerous times, and wrestling over the years with anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, pinkwashing, war and oppression, and what justice can look like. We likewise encourage you to share her essay and offer your own observations.

EMBASSY GUIDE

In our fall 2023 newsletter, we spotlighted the updated and expanded edition of CGE’s Accessing U.S. Embassies: A Guide for LGBTQI+ Human Rights Defenders, our resource for helping international partners understand and access U.S. embassies and missions and build and maintain productive working relationships with U.S. diplomatic and development staff around the world. This guide, originally released in English in June, is now also available in Spanish, French, and Arabic as well.

CELEBRATING OUR PARTNERS

To wind down on a happy note: we’ve just celebrated some amazing LBTQ+ activists for International Women’s Day, and we’re preparing to recognize equally remarkable trans and nonbinary advocates for Transgender Day of Visibility later this week.

While the forces pitted against equality and human rights for LGBTQI+ communities are growing stronger and more connected in many regions of the world, we also saw two heartwarming victories for marriage equality in Japan earlier this month. And as CGE member organization Amnesty International noted, “[b]y recognizing that the government’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, these rulings make clear that such discrimination has no place in Japanese society.” Equality, too, is on the march and discrimination has no place in any society, we just have to remember to look for it and celebrate it, even as we fight back against the forces of hate and extremism.

Project 2025: A Clear and Present Danger to Democracy

Click here for CGE’s fact sheet on the dangers Project 2025 poses to LGBTQI+ people.

“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

Have you heard yet about Project 2025? Developed by the Heritage Foundation in collaboration with more than 100 partners, Project 2025 is innocuously pitched as “the plan for the next conservative President” of the United States.

But the 950+ pages of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” including the anti-LGBTQI+ quote above, represent something far more dangerous and far more comprehensive than a list of policy proposals. As our colleagues at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism explain, “Project 2025 is an authoritarian roadmap to dismantling a thriving, inclusive democracy for all.”

This is not hyperbole. This is, as Carlos Lozada noted in a recent New York Times op-ed, a plan for “capturing the administrative state, not unmaking it. The main conservative promise here is to wield the state as a tool for concentrating power and entrenching ideology.”

The mainstream media has been slow to pick up on the direct threat Project 2025 poses to American democracy and the rule of law, and especially to LGBTQI+ people, to sexual and reproductive health and rights, and to other marginalized communities. But Lozada’s op-ed and other recent pieces suggests that major outlets are beginning to recognize the existential danger to democracy at hand. Moreover, if recent reports prove accurate, President Biden is preparing to put Project 2025 at the heart of his argument for why Donald Trump cannot be allowed to return to the White House.

Explicitly grounded in far-right Christian nationalism, Project 2025 is a vision for the future of the United States that is profoundly undemocratic. The plan’s authors seek to eviscerate the professional, apolitical civil service, staffing all federal agencies instead with ideological appointees chosen for their loyalty to the President.

Project Democracy outlines seven fundamental tactics used by aspiring authoritarians:

Attempting to politicize independent institutions; Spreading disinformation; Aggrandizing executive power at the expense of checks and balances; Quashing criticism and dissent; Specifically targeting vulnerable or marginalized communities; Working to corrupt elections; and Stoking violence.

All seven tactics appear all throughout 950+ hate-filled pages of the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership.

The Heritage Foundation and its partners vow to end racial equity efforts and climate change initiatives, implement “Fortress America” hardline immigration laws, and repeal so-called “woke” military policies. They would restrict human rights broadly and pull the United States out of international bodies such as the United Nations.

The Mandate for Leadership’s 950+ pages drip with unrelenting hate and contempt for LGBTQI+ people. Transgender people face particular vitriol from these extremists; this, unfortunately, is no surprise, with Project 2025’s leaders being intimately connected to those state legislators who have introduced more than 400 bills targeting transgender Americans in the first six weeks of 2024 alone.

From the very first page, the Mandate for Leadership equates so-called “transgenderism” with pornography, and all through the document, LGBTQI+ people are treated as deviants, not as Americans, not as stakeholders in their own government. The Project seeks, in its anti-LGBTQI+ and its restrictions on sexual and reproductive autonomy to demonize and penalize all non-traditional families, relying on junk science to back up its absurd claims that the Biden Administration is penalizing heterosexual marriage in favor of LGBTQI+ equity and single motherhood.

Globally, Project 2025 describes USAID’s LGBTQI+-inclusive programs as “bullying,” promises to end the U.S. Refugee Assistance Program that provides life-saving assistance to LGBTQI+ refugees and other refugees from vulnerable populations, and expands anti-LGBTQI+ and anti-reproductive health regulations to global health programs.

It vows to recommit the United States to the anti-abortion Geneva Consensus and the Commission on Unalienable Human Rights, which proposes a hierarchy of human rights elevating religious liberty and the right to private property while excluding LGBTQI+ rights and sexual and reproductive rights altogether.

The Council for Global Equality has published a fact sheet outlining the specific threats to LGBTQI+ human rights promised by Project 2025. Let’s be absolutely clear here: Project 2025’s targeting of LGBTQI+ people and of sexual and reproductive health and rights is inseparable from its overarching goal of dismantling democracy and capturing the U.S. federal government. It is no exaggeration to describe Project 2025’s Mandate as eliminationist, as it seeks to erase LGBTQI+ people from public life, from social protections, and from democratic citizenship altogether.

Last year, the Williams Institute published its report demonstrating a strong correlation between democratic backsliding and attacking LGBTQI+ rights, noting that “anti-LGBTI stigma and policies may contribute to the weakening of democratic norms and institutions [and that] increased persecution of minority groups, including LGBTI people, is itself evidence of democratic backsliding by indicating the erosion of liberal democratic norms of protecting minority rights.”

Project 2025’s dehumanization and exclusion of LGBTQI+ people is not an accident. This is an intentional strategy that aspiring authoritarians make, demonizing vulnerable minority communities as part of seizing political power — and BIPOC and immigrant LGBTQI+ people face even more demonization from the Heritage Foundation and its collaborators.

Let’s also clear that Project 2025 is not a vague wish list for the anti-democratic far right, nor is it intended to be a project that can be reversed by the next election. The assault on LGBTQI+ rights and sexual and reproductive health and rights are the entry points to the permanent capture of the federal government.

This is a very specific, detailed action plan for next year, a map to a journey that’s well underway now. Indeed, Project 2025 is already happening.  It’s happening in Argentina, where the new far-right President, Javier Milei, eliminated the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity immediately after taking office in December. It’s happening in Hungary, where President Viktor Orbán’s successful campaign to strip rights from LGBTQI+ people, women, and immigrants in service of building an “illiberal democracy” is the template for Project 2025. And it’s happening in U.S. states now, passing dozens upon dozens of anti-LGBTQI+ laws — some of which, such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, directly import Orbánism to the United States.

The evidence is piling up — in the House of Representatives, in state legislatures, and at local school boards, as well as around the world—that we must take the anti-rights movement broadly and Project 2025’s backers specifically at their word. They are telling us what they think of us and what they think of pluralistic, representative democracy.

We need to believe them — and at the same time, we must not lose hope. As Beirne Roose-Snyder, CGE’s own Senior Policy Fellow, recently told the rePROs Fight Back podcast, “hopelessness is a tool of oppression,” and the authors of Project 2025 need people to be “tired, hopeless, and passive, to see this as inevitable.”

It is not inevitable. But stopping the far right requires dragging their plans out into the light of day. It requires naming their plans, discussing it with our families, at work, in our faith communities, and beyond. It requires organizing – around national and state elections, to be sure, but also around local school board and judicial races and around protecting the integrity of elections themselves.

It requires coalition work — with voting rights advocates; with media workers and defenders of the free press; with sexual and reproductive health and rights activists; with racial justice, immigrant justice, disability justice, and climate justice organizers; with youth and with the labor movement; and with progressive faith communities.

There is much more to do and much more we could say. We’ll certainly be writing — and doing — plenty more about the clear and present danger that Project 2025, the Mandate for Leadership, the Heritage Foundation and their partners, and the larger anti-rights movement pose to inclusive, representative democracy. For the moment, please share the word, share our fact sheet, and let’s get to work.