In Cameroon, Cabrel Ngounou’s life quickly unraveled after neighbors caught the teenager with his boyfriend. A crowd surrounded his boyfriend’s house and beat him. Ngounou’s family learned of the relationship and kicked him out. Ngounou fled — alone and with little money — on a dangerous, four-year journey through at least five countries before eventually, arriving in the United States. Once he arrived at the border and asked for asylum, Ngounou joined a growing number of LGBTQ+ people accepted into the Welcome Corps, which launched last year and pairs groups of Americans with newly arrived refugees, The Associated Press reports. So far, the resettlement program has connected 3,500 sponsors with 1,800 refugees, and many more want to help: 100,000 people have applied to become sponsors. New refugee resettlement sites have opened across the country, and on Tuesday, the Biden Administration announced that it resettled 100,000 refugees in fiscal year 2024, the largest number in more than three decades.
Under Biden, two human rights officials in the State Department were tasked last year with identifying refugees who face persecution either due to their sexual orientation or human rights advocacy. “LGBTQ refugees are forced to flee their homes due to persecution and violence, not unlike other people,” said Jeremy Haldeman, deputy executive director of the Community Sponsorship Hub, which implements the Welcome Corps on behalf of the State Department. But LGBTZ people are particularly vulnerable because they’re coming from places “where their identities are criminalized and they are at risk of imprisonment or even death.” More than 60 countries have passed anti-LGBTQ laws and thousands of people have fled the Middle East and Africa seeking asylum. Of more than 15,000 requests for help in 2023, the nonprofit helped resettle 23 refugees through the Welcome Corps program in cities as large as Houston and towns as small as Arlington, Vermont. It has a goal of resettling 50 this year.
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