Maria Paz Perez was fighting both the frozen wind and her own tears. On March 8, Perez—alongside people of all ages and families from countries all over the world—gathered in Federal Plaza for the Immigrant Youth Justice League's fifth annual Coming Out of the Shadows rally.
[Additional photo spread at the link: www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/photospreadthumbs.php . ]
Perez remembered October 16th, 2013—the night US Immigration and Customs Enforcement ( ICE ) officers handcuffed her husband Brigido Acosta in front of her children and unceremoniously removed him from their lives. "They wouldn't tell him what the charges were. They left with my children and I huddled on the floor crying."
Acosta was detained for over a month. "He was given moldy food that smelled rancid," Perez sobbed.
On November 19, he was deported back to Mexico. "I couldn't touch him. I couldn't hug him. He was shackled for over 15 hours. When the shackles finally came off, his ankles and wrists were cut and bruised."
Brent Holman-Gomez and Andy Thayer attended the rally on behalf of the Gay Liberation Network. They stood in solidarity with event organizers and speakers who "undocumented and unafraid" demanded that President Obama stop separating families and end the practices of ICE which has deported over two million people since he took office. "Our own country is clamping down on asylum seekers attempting to feel countries with anti-gay laws like Nigeria, Russia and Uganda," Gomez explained to the Windy City Times. "The United States has made it much more difficult for people to apply for asylum to flee their country. You can't apply at your local consulate or embassy. People have to travel under false pretenses and then apply here. The US likes to preach about human rights abuses abroad but what is it doing about it?"
"In Nigeria, the government calls LGBT people illegal," Thayer added. "The government here calls people who are working with us in our community illegal. It's the same issue. You have the government from the top down naming second class citizens. It needs to stop."
Gomez also found it ironic that anti-gay activists like National Organization for Marriage co-founder Brian Brown and Christian conservative Scott Lively were freely able to visit Uganda and Russia in order to deliberately provoke anti-LGBTQ sentiments and lobby for anti-gay laws there.
26 year old Jorge Mena has been with the Immigrant Youth Justice League since the group's inception in 2009. "A lot of the organizers that first started the league were not just undocumented but queer," he told the Windy City Times. "We always felt like we had to choose a fight—today for my rights as an undocumented person, tomorrow for my rights as a queer person. Coming Out of the Shadows allows us to put our struggles together."
Mena named Harvey Milk as one of his principal influencers. "He showed the need to come out to your friends, family and teachers as queer. It's related to us having to come out to our teachers and friends as undocumented. At first we were completely frightened about that status but the more we come out about our status publically, the more that we talk about it, the less likely we are to be attacked."
Mena also noted that LGBTQ immigrants who are detained by ICE suffer abuses and often appalling conditions prior to deportation. "Women, trans and queer people are horribly mistreated," he said.
"We are all tired of running and hiding!" Stephanie Camba—performing under the name Soultre—cried from the stage. "Knowing the things we love most are going to be taken away from us, we are left wondering 'do our hearts not hurt, do our bodies not bleed the same?'We are human first before we are undocumented."
Marcela Espinoza describes herself as both undocumented and lesbian queer. On stage, she talked about eight years spent torn apart from her family in Mexico. "I remember the frustration and sadness I felt not being able to spend my mother, father and sibling's birthdays with them. My heart would sink every time I saw a family together because I knew I couldn't have that."
She told the Windy City Times that there is a synergy between undocumented and LGBTQ people. "We suffer the same things on a lot of levels. We have feelings, we have needs and we must have rights."
