Saving asylum and retaking the narrative: defending LGBTQ+ migrants in Tijuana

This episode, recorded on June 25, 2026, features Elijah Maurus, an attorney based in Tijuana who has worked principally with LGBTQ+ asylum seekers since 2018. Maurus relocated to Tijuana during the major migrant caravan that arrived in late 2018, initially working with Al Otro Lado before launching a pilot legal project dedicated to LGBT asylum seekers. The conversation moves roughly south to north, tracing the dangers LGBTQ+ migrants face crossing Mexico to reach safety in the United States. Maurus describes how Tijuana—which requires a difficult “left turn” across territory controlled by multiple cartels—nonetheless became one of the few border cities with dedicated LGBT shelters, though these remain scarce and small. He explains how vulnerabilities multiply “exponentially” for transgender and gender-nonconforming migrants at every checkpoint, river crossing, and cartel-controlled bus stop. He recounts witnessing the human toll of policies like “metering,” the Migrant Protection Protocols (Remain in Mexico), Title 42, and the cancellation of CBP One appointments. The second half of the discussion turns to the rapid deterioration of asylum protections in the United States since President Trump’s return to office in January 2025. Maurus details both the headline-grabbing measures—the suspension of asylum at the border, Supreme Court decisions issued that very morning upholding metering and allowing the removal of Temporary Protected Status from roughly 350,000 Haitians—and the quieter “death by a thousand cuts.” These include courthouse arrests after government attorneys move to dismiss cases, the use of “pretermission” to reject incomplete asylum applications, Asylum Cooperative Agreements that ship asylum seekers to third countries like Guatemala or Ecuador, and the gutting of the immigration court system through mass firings of judges and their replacement with “deportation judges.” Maurus devotes significant attention to immigration detention, which he calls a political and financial choice rather than a punishment. With $45 billion newly allocated and a goal of detaining 100,000 people per day in largely private facilities, he describes the elimination of the limited protections for transgender detainees that had existed under prior administrations—including the end of gender-affirming care, the housing of trans women among men, prolonged solitary confinement for trans men, and the disappearance of oversight mechanisms. He also raises the alarming practice of sending people with withholding-of-removal protections to dangerous third countries such as Eswatini or Uganda, where LGBTQ+ people face legal persecution. Despite the bleak picture, Maurus closes on a note of resolve. He argues that asylum remains salvageable but that advocates must stop ceding the narrative and avoid treating individual horror stories as isolated anecdotes rather than the products of deliberate policy. He emphasizes the importance of local-level storytelling, documentation for future accountability, and the simple insistence that turning people away violates the lessons learned after refugees were turned back to die during World War II.