Program areas at Immigration Equality
Legal Immigration Equality provides direct legal services and advocacy for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and hiv-positive (lgbtq/h) immigrants. We currently provide legal representation to more than 650 lgbtq/h individuals through our in-house legal team and nationwide pro bono network. Our staff attorneys provide direct legal representation and train pro bono attorneys on how to represent their asylum clients. Our legal team also staffs a hotline specifically for lgbtq/h asylum seekers detained in Immigration jails. In the past 12 months, our paralegals and attorneys fielded roughly 2,500 calls through this hotline, providing callers with resources, helping them place their asylum cases, and providing them referrals to additional legal and/or social services.traditional refugee programs often miss lgbtq+ people because of the unique challenges they face. We create new ways for lgbtq refugees to find resettlement opportunities outside their home countries. Working with other organizations to identify refugees in need, we carefully review cases and prepare referrals for the u.s. Refugee admissions program (usrap) and other resettlement programs. We have helped dozens of vulnerable lgbtq refugees from countries including afghanistan, colombia, egypt, el salvador, iran, iraq, guinea, kenya, rwanda, somalia, south sudan, syria, and uganda.
Outreach the organization's communications and public engagement efforts focus on the threats to lgbtq and hiv-positive people's safety and Equality, and how the government must remedy them. The organization's communications team regularly secures state and national level media placements on its issues across print and digital media outlets, television, and radio. More than 20,000 activists, attorneys, faith leaders, and other constituents subscribe to the organization's emails and action alerts, and its website has hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per year. The organization has more than 27,000 facebook fans, more than 17,000 twitter followers, and 13,000 instagram followers.