KIM WATSON, a transgender Barbadian woman who was facing deportation from the United States, has won the right to remain there after claiming that if she returned home she would likely be tortured or worse.
Watson, 53, who has a child and is married, was granted the right to stay in the US when she appeared before an immigration court on November 19.
She told a journalist during an interview: “I feel like if America had sent me back, they were signing off on a death sentence.”
Her attorney Rehan Nazrali argued her case before a federal judge and an assistant chief counsel from the Department of Homeland Security.
Watson has become a heralded champion and unrelenting advocate of the LGBT community in the Bronx.
During the past three years, she had been fighting her removal from the United States – and from her husband and daughter.
While tourists view the Caribbean island nation as a “paradise”, Watson saw her homeland as perdition for members of the LGBT community and people suffering from HIV.
Just before the trial started in the Manhattan court, the Homeland Security lawyer said he would not challenge Nazrali’s request for a deferral of removal, a rarely granted protective status that allows an undocumented immigrant to remain and work in the United States.
The US Department of Justice set up regulations in 1999 that protected undocumented immigrants from torture and inhumane treatment in their home countries.
Watson was born in 1964. From a young age, she said, she suffered serious abuse at the hands of her father and his friends because of the way she looked.
“I have always had feminine traits and characteristics and it was these features that made me stand out,” she said.
She said in school her classmates bullied her, hurled rocks and bottles at her and shouted derogatory comments.
Dr David Murray, a professor at York University in Canada, prepared a report for Watson’s case detailing the persecution that LGBT individuals and people who were HIV positive currently faced there.
Murray, a socio-cultural anthropologist who specialises in research on homosexuality and sexual and gender identity in the Caribbean, said that Barbados’ “anti-buggery” laws strengthened social stigma against homosexuals and made LGBT individuals less likely to seek help from police if they were the victims of a crime.
The US State Department also said in its 2014 report on Barbados that discrimination against LGBT individuals was among the nation’s most serious human rights problems.
At age 23, Watson left Barbados to escape abuse and to try to enrol in fashion school in New York City. She arrived in the United States on a tourist visa in 1988. When the pass expired, she remained.
She continued to struggle with mental illness and substance abuse.
While homeless, she was twice arrested for selling controlled substances in 1997 and 1998. Nazrali said that at the time she was going through a wrenching identity dysphoria that led to the run-ins with the law.
However, more than a decade ago, Watson said she went to rehab and started receiving counselling for PTSD and her other identity issues.
She said she earned a bachelor’s degree at Pace University and began grassroots organizing for LGBT issues and for HIV education.
She married in 2007, and she and her husband have an adopted daughter and live in Kingsbridge.
The two run a Bronx organisation called CK Life, which provides space for transgender individuals to gather and offers scholarships. Her work has been honoured by Bronx elected officials and citywide LGBT groups.
In 2012 she pleaded guilty to federal charges of trying to get a US passport and obtaining disability benefit payments and Medicaid payments while not being eligible. Those charges were what led to her deportation hearing. (MB)
