West Philly LGBTQ+ asylum shelter, a national rarity, is grappling with Trump’s immigration crackdown

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Since 2022, Asylum Pride House in West Philadelphia has supported LGBTQ+ asylum seekers with housing and a range of legal, health care and employment services.

It’s the only organization of its kind in the nation.

Victoria Sirois founded the organization after seeing a need for it while working at a national resettlement agency.

“A lot of case managers … were coming to me, knowing that I had been doing a lot of DEI training around working with LGBTQ populations, being that it’s my community,” she said. “They were coming, being like, ‘Our clients are being kicked out of the shelters. We don’t really know where to go. They don’t have family or friends. Where are the resources?’”

Sirois, who is also the director of Asylum Pride House, said LGBTQ+ immigrants face multiple challenges and obstacles that are unique to their identities.

“One of the most prominent issues is the lack of access to support networks, and so whether that’s family members or friends or other immigrant communities, because a lot of our folks are fearful of sharing why they’re seeking asylum, or even just, you know, their identity, whether they’re gay, trans, nonbinary, that really deters folks from reaching out,” she said. “Even if they do have connections here, they just don’t feel safe. And so that was a real reason why this organization was so important to start was because those connections are really not there.”

A 2022 study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that LGBTQ+ asylum seekers and refugees require targeted resources. The study concluded that more research and data are needed to better understand LGBTQ+ immigrants’ experiences and needs, and analyze patterns of persecution and migration around the globe.

Data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees shows that at the end of 2024, there were more than 42 million refugees worldwide, and more than 8 million asylum seekers.

But the number of people within those groups who are LGBTQ+, and/or are fleeing persecution because of their identity, is unknown, the Williams Institute report found.

Cathryn Miller-Wilson, executive director of HIAS Pennsylvania, which serves low-income immigrants throughout the state, said that a number of their clients seeking asylum were persecuted because they are LGBTQ+, and in some cases could have faced the death penalty in their home countries.

“They are grateful, but nevertheless, it is so terrifying in their home country that it kind of takes a lot for, first of all, the client to share all the details about what they went through with our staff and who they are, and what’s going on for them,” she said.

HIAS Pennsylvania works with nonprofit organizations, including Asylum Pride House and the William Way LGBT Center, to connect its LGBTQ+ clients with resources. But forming those connections requires patience and understanding, Miller-Wilson said.

“They need community, but they’re also terrified and don’t trust anyone. So it kind of takes a lot of talking, a lot of relationship building, and then warm hand offs,” she said. “We would rarely just give an LGBTQ client a phone number. We would kind of say, ‘Is it okay if I call this person who I think can help you? And we’ll do it together.’”

Prioritizing Philadelphia-based, trans and nonbinary asylum seekers

In September 2023, Asylum Pride House began renting the five-bedroom apartment in West Philadelphia. Since then, more than a dozen LGBTQ+ asylum seekers have called it home.

“We always have a wait list, but we try to prioritize folks that are in Philadelphia already, just because they’re already setting roots here and getting connected to services,” Sirois said. “And then prioritizing trans and nonbinary folks, just because they’re the most vulnerable when it comes to housing.”

Sirois said Asylum Pride House connects with their clients via referrals from organizations and attorneys nationwide. Some of the residents find them through the organization’s website.

The immigrants supported by Asylum Pride House represent a wide range of identities, cultures and backgrounds, Sirois said. The home takes in up to six people at a time.

Residents have come from countries including China, Colombia, Honduras, Jamaica, Guinea, Nigeria, Uganda, Venezuela, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Sierra Leone. Some of the clients are seeking asylum because of persecution of the LGBTQ+ community in their home countries. Others are seeking asylum for another reason, Sirois said, but as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, they face distinct obstacles in the immigration process.

In addition to legal assistance, Asylum Pride House’s case management services include helping clients open bank accounts, providing clothes and other immediate needs, connecting people with English as a second language classes and helping with job searches.

Sirois said the organization also helps people access health care with LGBTQ+-inclusive providers. Mental health care, she said, is particularly important for many of the people they work with.

“I’ve worked in the immigration field for 10 years now, and queer immigrants, particularly folks seeking some sort of humanitarian protection, the level of trauma is really beyond anything I’ve ever seen,” she said. “A lot of our folks need to be connected to not just getting a bank account and going to ESL classes. They really need therapeutic services, medical treatment, things that are hard to access, especially if you are trans or nonbinary, gay, where there’s a lot of stigma.”

Clients usually stay at the house on average from six months to a year, and Asylum Pride House helps them find permanent housing. Even after they move out, Sirois said, the organization still provides support by offering what she described as light case management.

Activities and programming with their Wellness for Recently Arrived Persons, or WRAP program, help create a deeper sense of community, she said.

“We’ve had some really wonderful friendships that we’ve seen grow from our housing program and folks that, even after they’ve moved out, we have people coming back for dinner,” Sirois said.

Dessy, who did not want to share her last name for fear of targeting by federal immigration enforcement, and her wife lived in Asylum Pride House from August 2023 to May 2024. They both applied for asylum due to persecution for being gay.

Dessy said they connected with Asylum Pride House thanks to a pastor in Baltimore.

“It was an excellent experience because of the fact that during the time we were in Asylum Pride House, in the program, we felt safe,” she said.

Dessy said that, in addition to housing, legal support and help finding work and health care, the organization also hosted activities that connected them with community members and the city as a whole. Since moving out of the house, Dessy said she and her wife continue to participate in the organization’s activities and maintain their connection with staff members and other clients.

But the journey still hasn’t been easy.

Dessy said she and her wife have faced racial discrimination as well as homophobia, and increased immigration enforcement on the part of the Trump administration has been “quite traumatic.”

“As homosexual people, that isolates us from social groups,” she said. “Meanwhile, with Asylum, we felt like family. We have a family, we are a family, we are a community.”

‘Devastating’ impact from Trump administration’s immigration policy

Miller-Wilson, of HIAS Pennsylvania, said that the Trump administration has introduced additional legal challenges for asylum seekers, but prior to January 2025, the process was still arduous, arbitrary and costly.

“Things are so bad now, but so many people don’t realize actually half of it was always that bad,” she said.

Miller-Wilson said that asylum seekers, once they’re allowed into the country following a credible fear interview, have one year to petition for asylum. They have to find a lawyer, and aren’t able to file for work authorization until six months after submitting their asylum application.

“Most of them have fled with the clothes on their back,” she said. “Literally. I mean, I was talking to a client who fled in the middle of the night because soldiers came because they thought that he was gay, he was at his parents’ house, and they murdered his father, who refused to say … where his son was. And so he slipped out. His mother slipped him out the back door, and he just ran and ran and ran until he crossed out of Uganda and was able to get to safety. So that’s very common.”

Miller-Wilson said the work that Asylum Pride House does is “critical” for supporting asylum seekers who have filed a legal petition but are forced to wait to apply for work authorization and are unable to make money right away.

“This is before January 2025, you come in, you’re totally vulnerable,” she said. “You have nothing. You have no way to get anything until at least six months after you file a legal petition.”

President Donald Trump has made several changes that impact asylum seekers since taking office in January. Trump’s “one big beautiful bill,” passed in July, introduced changes to the filing process, requiring asylum seekers to pay $100 to submit their asylum petition, and an additional $100 each year until their case is resolved. Asylum seekers now also have to pay $500 to submit their work authorization application.

Miller-Wilson said the work authorization process under the current administration has been delayed, making the wait time for work permits even longer.

The administration has also fired some immigration judges, Miller-Wilson said, leaving even fewer resources to deal with the case backlog. Meanwhile, the asylum judges that remain have been subject to a “chilling effect” of anti-immigrant rhetoric.

“The judges have gotten the certain message loud and clear that we don’t really believe any of these people are telling the truth or deserve asylum,” she said. “If you have a grant rate that is too high, we’re going to start wondering what you’re doing, and probably accuse you of helping undocumented people or just get rid of you by firing you, or just yell at you, or whatever. So there’s higher scrutiny on that level.”

That scrutiny intensifies one of the preexisting challenges for asylum seekers: Proving asylum has become even more challenging, Miller-Wilson said, especially for those seeking refuge due to persecution because of being LGBTQ+.

“Uganda, you have a law you can point to, but there are other countries where it’s not so clear,” she said. “It’s more sort of like culturally, they’re homophobic, and so you’ll see a lot of assaults, and then attempts to go to the police, and then the police didn’t do anything, and then maybe even further assaulted the victim, right? But it’s very hard to prove that that happened, because police records disappear and everybody denies it. And how are you going to get a police guy from Sudan to testify that? Like, ‘Oh yeah, he reported the crime to me, and I ignored him.’ He’s not going to say that.”

Some advocates are also reporting that affirmative asylum cases, which are heard by an asylum officer in U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, are being pushed into immigration court as defensive claims, which automatically places the person in removal proceedings, Sirois said.

“There’s just a lot of assumptions around what people are coming to the U.S. seeking protection for and why,” Sirois said. “You know, quote, unquote, some are more valid than others, when really it’s all just people trying to find somewhere safe to live and find a community that they can be a part of and not have fear of being targeted or at risk, or their family being at risk … It’s pretty devastating right now. I think we’re just going to keep seeing things like this happen, more restrictions.”

Sirois said the organization is also working with immigrants who are pursuing other legal pathways to residency, including those impacted by the Trump administration’s freeze on funding for refugee resettlement services and the end of Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from several countries.

“We’re trying to navigate with more complex cases than we’ve really seen before, people that really didn’t think that they needed to apply for asylum, but now statuses like TPS are being revoked for people, and there’s a bit of panic in that not having some other kind of status is really dangerous,” she said. “So we’re seeing folks that you know would not have usually reached out, but are now really looking for some sort of support and referrals.”

‘We can’t just hide’

With Trump’s stated goal of deporting 1 million people annually, which has seen U.S. citizens as well as people with legal residency detained and deported during ramped-up immigration raids throughout the country, Sirois said many residents of Asylum Pride House live in fear even if they have legal status.

“I don’t think anyone in our program feels safe, which is just devastating, because that’s really the goal of of our entire program, is to make sure that people feel not even just physically safe, but aware of their rights, about immigration, about their case, about what they need to know to feel confident as they move through the community that they’re in now,” she said. “As much as we try, there’s no way to even tell people what’s happening, because we don’t know what’s happening … It’s the administration’s whole point right now, I think, is using that vagueness and kind of hiddenness to just create this fear, and it’s just spreading.”

Sirois said the organization and members of the house have also been grappling with the Trump administration’s attacks on gender-affirming care and the LGBTQ+ community as a whole.

The organization considered going “underground,” she said, before Trump took office in January, and they are careful about protecting clients’ images and identities for fear of targeting by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or other federal agencies.

“We had some serious conversations about that, and I think we kept seeing folks reaching out, and we were like, we can’t just hide,” she said. “It’s awful we’re gonna be navigating this for the next years, and yet, at the same time, if we stop saying that we’re here, no one’s gonna know that we’re here. And that’s also part of the problem, because we want our folks to know, our LGBTQ+ immigrant communities to know that we’re here if they need support.”

Sirois said there has been so much demand recently that Asylum Pride House is now looking to expand and grow to house between 15–30 people.

“We’ve had more people reaching out, not necessarily as many super recently-arrived folks, but folks that have been in the community that are now not accessing resources, they are afraid of losing their immigration status,” she said. “So I don’t really think that we’re ever going to not have folks that need housing.”

Sirois said anyone interested in supporting the organization’s work can sign up for their newsletter online.

Asylum Pride House is planning a fundraiser walk in October and a holiday gift drive in December.