Same Systems, Different Targets: Why White Families of Trans Youth Can’t Ignore Anti-Immigrant Attacks
Anti-immigrant and anti-trans policies are deeply intertwined, fueled by the same systems of power. When white families of trans youth stand in true solidarity with immigrant communities, we build collective strength. When we don’t, we all lose.
When I wrote about our family’s experiences at the intersection of immigrant justice and trans liberation, I did so as someone who has lived through both. We were at one point a multi-status family with a transgender child, and we had a deep understanding that the policies targeting our loved ones often came from the same place: fear, control, and a desire to punish anyone who refuses to fit into narrow definitions of belonging.
But this fight isn’t just ours. I’ve spent years in community with other families of trans youth, many of whom are white, and often, their lived experiences haven’t required them to navigate systems like ICE, immigration paperwork, or language barriers. These differences create real gaps in understanding how anti-immigrant and anti-trans struggles are deeply interconnected. And while some may not initially see themselves as directly impacted by anti-immigrant policies, I’ve witnessed how these same policies and ideologies ripple outward, shaping the terrain for all of us. Even families who haven’t personally faced these barriers are living with the consequences of a political project built on anti-immigrant fear.
The Same Political Machine
The anti-immigrant and anti-trans movements are not separate. They are two parts of the same machine. The same politicians who call migrants “invaders” are the ones pushing sports bans, bathroom bills, and book bans. The same think tanks and legal organizations funding border militarization are funding lawsuits against gender affirming care.
When we focus only on how these policies affect “our” specific community, we miss the bigger picture, which is that trans youth are being targeted by the same infrastructure that has long targeted immigrant families. The faces and language may change, but the machinery remains constant.
Surveillance Spreads
Anti-immigrant policies rely on surveillance, control, and bureaucratic cruelty. They expand state powers that are then turned on other communities.
When the state builds mechanisms to monitor immigrants’ identities, restrict their documents, and police their movements, those mechanisms don’t disappear once they’re built. They’re redirected. White families of trans youth are now seeing some of those same tools used against them. Restrictions on gender markers, school surveillance policies, and attempts to criminalize supportive parenting are all extensions of tactics perfected on immigrant communities.
Legal Recognition and the Fight for Identity
One of the clearest overlaps between anti-immigrant and anti-trans politics is the way the state controls identity through documents. I’ve seen it up close. Jose spent years navigating immigration paperwork. These documents defined whether he could work, travel, or simply exist in this country without fear. A single piece of paper determined his future.
Daniel has faced his own version of this fight. We had to sue the state of Arizona just to update the gender marker on his birth certificate. Birth certificates are required constantly in childhood for school enrollment, city sports leagues, and eventually for things like obtaining a driver’s license. Every milestone, every extracurricular activity forced us to calculate whether disclosure felt safe, because privacy was nearly impossible. Each moment was a reminder that his identity only “counts” if the state decides to recognize it.
This is not a coincidence. For both immigrants and trans people, access to accurate identity documents determines whether you can move through the world safely. Accurate identification dictates whether you can enroll in school, access healthcare, get a job, or even prove your existence in court. And when the state denies those documents, it doesn’t just inconvenience people, it renders them invisible or criminal.
Anti-immigrant policies have long weaponized this. Denying IDs to undocumented people, restricting access to driver’s licenses, or refusing to recognize foreign documents has been a way to keep communities vulnerable. Now we’re seeing similar tactics used against trans people, such as blocking gender marker changes, banning legal name changes, or passing laws that require “biological sex” on IDs.
It’s also really important to note, especially after one of the early executive orders that were put out this year, that “legality” itself has always been used as a weapon against immigrant communities, and we are now seeing that same language of legal recognition weaponized against transgender people. For decades, the U.S. has relied on the category of “illegality” to strip immigrant communities of their rights. People are not “illegal” or “undocumented” in some natural sense; they are rendered not legally recognized by the state. And through that bureaucratic erasure, the government claims that entire groups of people do not deserve due process, fair treatment, accessible pathways to citizenship, or legal protections.
We are watching the same playbook unfold against transgender people. When Trump signed an executive order earlier this year stating that his administration would no longer legally recognize transgender people, it sent shockwaves through our communities. It wasn’t just symbolic. It was a reminder that policy can erase recognition overnight, leaving communities vulnerable to further harm. Immigrant and trans communities have long understood that legality is not neutral; it is a political tool that determines who gets protected and who gets punished. When governments decide who “exists” in legal terms, they are also deciding who can be targeted with impunity.
These document and recognition battles are not about paperwork alone, they’re about power. The state decides who gets to be seen, who gets to belong, and who gets pushed into the shadows. And both immigrant families and families of trans youth are navigating these systems that were intentionally structured to marginalize them, forcing them to confront discrimination and barriers embedded deep within law, policy, and culture.
Erosion of Parental Rights
Our family has watched in anger as politicians weaponize the language of “parental rights” while systematically infringing on ours. When they send CPS to the homes of affirming parents in Texas, when they criminalize supportive medical care, when they target school districts that affirm trans students, they are attacking the right to parent autonomously, freely, and with dignity.
Parents of trans youth are now feeling some of the fear that immigrant parents have long known; the fear of state intervention in their families. These tactics were normalized at the border with family separation, justified in Indigenous communities through forced child removal, and perfected through centuries of racial control and enslavement. Now, they’re being aimed at families raising trans children.
It is terrifying to be faced with the possibility of losing your child simply because you love, affirm, and support who they are. No parent should have to fear that their child could be taken from them for providing access to gender affirming care, protection, and acceptance. But that is exactly what many families of trans youth are living through. The state has positioned itself as the ultimate arbiter of what is “acceptable” parenting, weaponizing child welfare systems against loving families. As parents, we know our children best. We know what they need to thrive, to feel safe, and to grow into their full selves. Our love for our children should never be grounds for investigation or punishment. It should be protected. And immigrant families are facing these same fears, often under even more dangerous conditions. For families who exist at the intersections as immigrant parents raising trans children the stakes are even higher. The threat isn’t just losing access to healthcare or facing CPS investigations; it can mean deportation, family separation, and being targeted by multiple systems at once. These families live with compounded fear, constantly navigating overlapping structures that have historically been used to criminalize both immigrants and trans people.
The Culture of Fear Reaches Everyone
Anti-immigrant rhetoric doesn’t just harm immigrants; it creates a broader climate of fear and authoritarianism, which we are seeing play out in cities across the U.S. When people are taught to fear “outsiders,” they become more willing to accept the erosion of rights for everyone. Anti-immigrant fear paves the way for attacks on trans people, on reproductive rights, on education, and on basic civil liberties.
I’ve seen parents who once felt “safe” from these kinds of policies suddenly realize that their children are being targeted too. That the same rhetoric once used to criminalize immigrants is now being used to paint their kids as dangerous. It’s a painful awakening, but it’s also an opportunity.
Solidarity Is Not Optional
If there’s one thing our family’s journey has made clear, it’s that solidarity is not charity, but survival. Families of trans youth cannot afford to sit out of the fight against anti-immigrant attacks. Because the tools built to target immigrant families will be used against theirs, too. And because justice that doesn’t include everyone will eventually include no one.
This is the moment for white families to stand beside immigrant communities, not in parallel. To fight not just for their children’s right to exist, but for the rights of all families to love, raise, and protect their kids without fear of the state knocking at their door.
Our movements are strongest when we recognize that these fights are connected. The lines between anti-immigrant and anti-trans politics are not blurry, they’re identical. And unless we confront that together, we’re all destined to lose.
How Allied Families Can Show Up
Understanding the connections between anti-immigrant and anti-trans politics isn’t enough. It has to move us to act. Allied families of trans youth have a powerful role to play in this fight. Not because immigrant communities need “saving,” but because our liberation is intertwined. Here are some of the ways allied families can show up right now:
Speak up in spaces where immigrant voices are absent. Use your access whether in schools, community boards, or political meetings to name anti-immigrant policies and make clear how they are tied to anti-trans attacks. Challenge rhetoric that isolates these issues.
Show up for immigrant-led organizing. Support immigrant justice groups, not just trans rights organizations. That can mean donating, volunteering, amplifying campaigns, or simply following their leadership in local actions.
Defend identity and documentation rights for everyone. If you’re fighting for your child’s right to accurate legal documents, also fight against laws that deny immigrants access to IDs or driver’s licenses. These are not separate battles.
Build cross-community relationships. Solidarity doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Get to know immigrant families in your community, and make an effort to see these families not as “issues” but as people and neighbors. Show up in moments of crisis (like ICE raids or legal hearings) the way you’d want others to show up for your child.
Leverage privilege strategically. Allied families often have greater access to media, political representatives, and institutions. Use that access to uplift immigrant voices, challenge xenophobia, and push for intersectional policy change.
Model what solidarity looks like for your kids. Our children are watching us. When they see us standing with other communities, they learn that justice isn’t selective, but actually collective.
This moment demands more than passive support. It demands visible, sustained, and unapologetic solidarity. White families of trans youth can either help reinforce existing power structures through silence, or help dismantle them by standing shoulder to shoulder with immigrant/BIPOC communities.
Families of trans youth may not all face ICE raids or immigration paperwork, but they are living within the same political ecosystem that produces both anti-immigrant and anti-trans hate. The sooner we see these connections, the stronger our collective resistance becomes.
The same system that tried to strip Daniel of his rights is the system that cages immigrants at the border. It’s the same system that surveils parents, erases identities, and punishes anyone who refuses to assimilate.
We all have a stake in dismantling that system. And we need everyone, immigrant and non-immigrant, trans and cis, white and BIPOC to fight for each other with the urgency this moment demands.
Lizette Trujillo (she/her/ella) is a first-generation Chicanx advocate, small business owner, and proud mother of a transgender son. Based in Tucson and currently living abroad, she supports families through the Gender Liberation Movement and volunteers with FamiliaTQLM. An alumna of the Human Rights Campaign’s Parents for Transgender Equality National Council, Lizette’s advocacy has been featured in The Guardian, Rolling Stone, CNN, and NBC News. You can learn more about her family in the ACLU’s “Freedom to Be Daniel” campaign and the short film Daniel Really Suits You on YouTube. Lizette also co-hosts The Parent Advocate Podcast and writes The Mamí Advocate on Substack, where she shares her parenting journey and guidance for families of transgender youth.
(Photo: courtesy of Lizette Trujillo, used with permission.)
