“I grew up hearing congressional representatives, community leaders, and the media calling my community ‘illegal aliens,’ ‘criminal aliens,’ and ‘illegals.’ I learned to think of myself as an alien, not a student a foreigner, not a community member a criminal rather than a human being. “I was born in Mexico, but I am a queer, formerly undocumented - now DACAmented - immigrant from Phoenix,” says Garcia-Madrid. Garcia-Madrid urges support for orgs like Trans Queer Pueblo ( ). Garcia-Madrid is currently a part of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, where they support unaccompanied children in their immigration cases, and will be starting law school this fall “with the goal of defending the rights of queer and trans migrants.” They’ve also worked with the National Minority AIDS Council Act Against AIDS initiative the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship and Union=Fuerza: The Latinx Institute at Creating Change. On a mission to protect and support LGBTQ immigrants, the 26-year-old, gender-nonconforming femme is “inspired by trans and LGBTQ migrants who flee severe violence in their home countries,” saying, “the act of migrating is an act of hope.”
