As the fight for immigration reform rages on, and LGBTQ activists continue to make great strides towards equal rights, one group that doesn’t quite fit neatly into either box are LGBTQ immigrants.

This is especially true when undocumented LGBTQ immigrants get put into immigration detention.

Erika Sanchez recently wrote about this issue for truth-out.org. Latino USA Producer Daisy Rosario spoke to Sanchez and to a young man named Jonathan Perez who entered detention voluntarily.

Erika L Sánchez is a poet and writer living in Chicago. Her work has been published in Cosmopolitan for Latinas, NBCLatino, Truthout, Salon, Rolling Stone, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and other publications. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and the 2013 “Discovery”/Boston Review poetry prize. Find her on  Facebook, or Twitter.

Jonathan Perez is a queer undocumented immigrant from Colombia, and a Founder of the Immigrant Youth Coalition in  California. Perez organized successfully to stop punitive discipline policies and successfully led a campaign to build 3 new schools in his community in Los Angeles. He soon realized that he could no longer remain in the shadows. The youth who looked up to him, many of whom who were also undocumented, pushed him into immigrants’ rights work. His journey has taken him from civil disobedience to being locked up in an immigration detention center.

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