By JAMES KILLEN

What Andre Azevedo misses most about his home country of Brazil are his aging grandparents and the alluring nature that dominates more than 3 million square miles of exotic South American landscape. But as a transgender man who has recently been granted asylum in the U.S., he will most likely never have the chance to see his grandparents or flora and fauna of Brazil again. Azevedo said he will never return to his native land.

“Some people in Brazil practice violence like a sport. They will say, ‘let’s go bash some gays tonight,’ or something like that. They act as if it is something that is justified, and act as if it is okay,” says Azevedo. “… I never felt safe, and I don’t think I will ever feel safe unless things change very dramatically.”

According to Azevedo, and many human rights reports, Brazil is one of the worst places to live for those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. In 2004, over 150 gay people were killed in Brazil, according to a report released by Grupo Gay da Bahia, one of Brazil’s largest and most active rights organizations. The BBC reported in 2007 that, according to activists, between the years 1980 through 2006 some 2,680 gay people were murdered in Brazil, the majority thought to have been killed because of their sexuality.

“Brazil is a pretty open-minded country; they are really open-minded when it comes to topics like sex, and things like that, but really only in a heterosexual way,” says Azevedo. “Things are only acceptable when it comes to a straight couple, but then when it comes to the gay community and the transgender community, it is a very different story.”

Now living in New York City, Azevedo has become part of a small but growing community of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, or LGBT, immigrants who are seeking refuge in the U.S under federal law that allows protection to those who can prove a fear of persecution in their countries of origin. Since the early 1990’s, U.S. immigration law has recognized persecution on account of sexual orientation as a ground to apply for asylum.

Steve Ralls, director of communication for the advocacy group Immigration Equality, said that the organization has helped win more than 55 asylum cases for immigrants in the past year, and that more immigrants who are gay or transgender have been reaching out for help with their asylum cases. Ralls said that many of Immigration Equality’s clients are fleeing from countries where they were regular targets of vicious attacks because of their sexual orientation. He said they have been ostracized, beaten, raped, and isolated from their families while having little or no support to help them.

“I think for a lot of LGBT Americans, they see the U.S. as slow-paced or behind the curve in terms of equality and LGBT rights,” says Ralls. “But compared to other countries, the U.S. is leaps and bounds above the rest of the world, especially in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Jamaica where members of the LGBT community are openly persecuted…that’s why many asylum seekers choose the U.S. as a place for refuge.”

Up until 1994, U.S. immigration law did not recognize persecution based on sexual orientation as grounds for asylum. That changed once the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that a gay Cuban immigrant, Fidel Toboso-Alfonso, belonged to a particular social group based on his sexual orientation. Under this ruling, Toboso-Alfonso fit into the legal definition of a refugee: an individual who has left his or her native country and is unwilling or unable to return to it because of past persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular group. On June 19 of that year, former Attorney General Janet Reno mandated that the matter of Toboso-Alfonso serve as the precedent for all future cases involving sexual orientation and asylum.

Azevedo is one of Immigration Equality’s most recent clients to be granted asylum. At 39 years old, he has remained in the U.S. for the past 16 years, returning to Brazil for a combined total of less than two months. While living in Brasília when he was younger, Azevedo says, he was frequently discriminated against, and in one incident was attacked while he was out with a group of other transgender people.

“When I was there [in Brazil] I was very androgynous, and I was often confused to be a gay man, so I would have prejudice against me because people thought I was a gay man; I had prejudice against me because people thought I was a dyke, so I experienced different kinds, but all very much in the same spirit of being very prejudiced and hateful,” says Azevedo.

Fed up with horrible social conditions and what seemed like unbridled homophobia taking place in Brazil, Azevedo decided that he had to leave. His ticket out: acceptance into the graphic design program at the Atlanta School of Art.

After getting a degree in graphic design in Atlanta, he soon found a job as an art director and graphic designer, while also working on freelance projects for supplemental income. Because he was considered a skilled worker in the eyes of immigration law, Azevedo qualified for a temporary work visa allowing him to stay in the U.S. as long as he remained steadily employed.

Then one day in early 2009, everything came crashing down. Azevedo lost his job in layoffs at Draftfcb, a multimedia design company. Losing his job couldn’t have come at a worse time as he had just started to make the physical transition from a woman to a man. Without a job, he had no visa, and no visa meant that he might have to return to Brazil – exactly what he feared most.

“This is a situation in which you are so afraid of going back to your country that you can’t bring that up. It’s scary because if you bring it up, you have the option of being sent back. You are afraid that if you make that step forward, what might end up happening to you is what you fear the most. That is the drawback or the fear,” says Azevedo, adding, ”I was like, ‘oh my God, what am I going to do?’ I couldn’t go back to Brazil, and that was a problem.”

George Fesser works in the world of problems similar to Azevedo’s. As program coordinator of Center Care in lower Manhattan and leader of a support group for gay and transgender immigrants, Fesser helps many immigrants – documented and undocumented – deal with issues they face as victims and survivors of past persecution. One of the biggest problems Fesser encounters while working with newly arrived immigrants is that they are extremely isolated, and are often in denial and depressed as they try to come to grips with the suffering and trauma they experienced in their home countries.

“They are really scared. A lot of people get suicidal; some people get extremely depressed,” says Fesser. “There are some with no immigration status, no working papers, no insurance, no access to anti-depressants, no access to normal medical care – for somebody that has nothing, it’s a very precarious situation to be in…they try to hide, get off the radar as much as possible, but they don’t realize that there are many, many other people who are going through the same thing they are going through.”

Center Care’s immigration support program initially started in 1994, although Fesser says that the organization has always offered services to immigrants. He has been running the program since 1998.

In the beginning, he said, there were only about three or so people who would attend the support meetings, but today there are about 30 to 40 people who come every week to an English-speaking group, and another 20 to 30 who come to a Spanish-speaking group.

The group tries to help asylum applicants by providing information on access to lawyers and personal counseling services throughout the process. Since the group’s inception, Fesser and Center Care have helped over 200 immigrants from 34 different countries obtain asylum, a 100 percent success rate, according to Fesser.

Despite the successes Fesser and the Center Care have had with their clients thus far, it is not an easy task to win an asylum case. Federal records gathered by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse University show that for Brazilian asylum seekers between the years 2001 and 2006, more than 75 percent of asylum cases were denied, and out of the 96 other countries surveyed, it ranks as the 20th country with the highest denial rates. Jamaica ranks first with more than 90 percent of asylum cases being denied. The data do not identify the grounds on which asylum was sought, however.

One of the major obstacles asylum applicants face is a 1996 law that states an asylum seeker must apply within one year of the last entry into the U.S. Exceptions can be made for “changed circumstances” and “extraordinary circumstances,” according to the Immigration Equality Website.

Some examples of “changed circumstances” are that the asylum seeker did not “come out” until he or she was in the U.S., or the asylum seeker had sex reassignment surgery in the U.S..

The “extraordinary circumstances” are the cases that Fesser mainly works with in the support group. Some examples of “extraordinary circumstances” are if the asylum seeker suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder or severe depression as a result of what happened in his or her country and was unable to file the application when he or she first came to the U.S., or the asylum seeker consulted with an attorney who committed malpractice and the asylum seeker then filed a complaint against that attorney, according to Immigration Equality.

“Sixty percent of our people who are in the program are here past the one year deadline,” says Fesser. “With the whole clampdown after 9/11, all these folks that haven’t applied are coming to the realities that they have to do something…It has taken them more than a year, sometimes two, sometimes 10 to kind of get over what happened to them at home, and come out of the closet, and deal with the reality of their lives being undocumented.”

Along with the application, the asylum seeker must provide detailed personal accounts of past persecution accompanied with medical and police reports, or letters from witnesses to back up the applicant’s testimony. The asylum seeker must also submit a country conditions summary consisting of human rights reports, newspaper articles, and personal accounts from expert witnesses demonstrating how the government treats lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the applicant’s country of origin. Fesser helps gather these materials for his client’s cases.

“You don’t get asylum because people called you ‘faggot’ back home,” Fesser says. “You get asylum because people persecuted you back home. So if they called you ‘faggot’ and threw you out of your apartment building because you started living there with your lover – that is persecution…it goes beyond being called ‘faggot’ or ‘dyke’ or whatever, it goes to actual discrimination and persecution of who you are.”

Luckily for Azevedo, his asylum process only took four months, while there are some cases that persist in the system for years. With the help of Immigration Equality, Azevedo started applying for his asylum in April, and the following July he was receiving paperwork in the mail stating that he could remain in the U.S.

To this day, Azevedo is grateful that he has found a place in the world that affords him the protection and freedom to just be, despite the discrimination that still exists throughout the U.S and other parts of the world.

“I always try to make a distinction as to what the law says and the way that it really is…in real life I still think that there are a lot of prejudices in the United States and in the world,” says Azevedo. “The U.S. as a sanctuary? I wouldn’t characterize it as such, but I would say that it is a place that offers more protection than others, and that there is more protection here than in my country – I think I’m going to be here for a while.”