A transgender asylum seeker from Mexico, identified in court filings as O.J.M., has been released after spending 43 days in immigration detention. She was arrested in early June, just after attending an asylum hearing at the Portland Immigration Court, and was held at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington.
O.J.M. is one of many asylum seekers arrested and detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of the Trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration -- a policy critics argue subverts due process. In one related case, a gay makeup artist seeking asylum was deported and imprisoned in a maximum-security facility in El Salvador after being wrongly accused of gang affiliation. He has since been released.
More than 2,400 anti-LGBTQ hate crimes were reported in 2024, according to data from the FBI's newly-released Hate Crime Statistics Report.
The FBI reports that there were 2,413 single-bias incidents specifically targeting LGBTQ people. Of those incidents, 81% targeted people for their real or perceived sexual orientation and 19% for their real or perceived gender identity.
Notably, the 2024 sexual-orientation category includes 25 cases in which heterosexual people were allegedly victims of bias-motivated crimes.
Rapper and pop culture personality Snoop Dogg blasted LGBTQ representation in children’s movies, recounting on the It's Giving podcast that he was shocked when his grandson saw two mothers depicted in Pixar’s 2022 film Lightyear.
"They're like, 'She had a baby -- with another woman.' Well, my grandson, in the middle of the movie, is like, 'Papa Snoop? How she have a baby with a woman? She's a woman!'" Snoop recalled to host Sarah Fontenot, as reported by Entertainment Weekly
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