Tere, a transgender woman from Venezuela, beamed as she explained the great deal she got on the living room furniture set she bought for her two-bedroom apartment on Chicago’s South Side.
“The whole set was $1,300, but I got it for $700 with the cushions and the side tables,” she said in Spanish. She was able to pay for it in installments of $100 and $200 — a luxury she couldn’t have afforded if not for the steady cleaning job she landed soon after getting her work permit.
Tere, who arrived in Chicago in 2023, has a pending asylum application. Yet she fears the health care and the sense of normalcy she’s worked so hard to find will disappear as President Donald Trump’s administration targets both recently arrived migrants for deportation and the rights of transgender people.
WBEZ is not using Tere’s full name because she fears deportation.
The 39-year-old grew up in what she describes as a predominantly anti-trans and anti-gay Venezuelan culture, where she experienced constant harassment and violence.
“They would tease me. Sometimes they would throw rocks at me, even throw bottles at me when I was walking by,” Tere said. The violence didn’t stop there.
“When I was 25, I was almost raped,” she said. “One night, I was going to a party and some thugs grabbed me, but someone from the neighborhood helped me out.”
Tere left Venezuela, first to Colombia and then to Peru, but the discrimination and lack of opportunities in those countries wasn’t much different from her native Venezuela.
She headed to the United States, crossing the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama, in the hopes of finally finding a more peaceful life. She almost missed her immigration appointment at the U.S.-Mexico border because the official called out a male name. Her documents only show the name she was given at birth.
When she made it through, she was among the thousands of migrants who were bused or flown from Texas to Chicago in 2023. Tere was allowed into the U.S. with the CBP One app, a government tool available under the Biden administration that facilitated border crossings for migrants seeking asylum. She stayed at O’Hare Airport for weeks, where migrants waited for shelter beds to become available. Tere was later transferred to a city-run migrant shelter, where she says she faced harassment, hostility and poor treatment.
“One time, I was going to the women’s bathroom and a staffer told me I shouldn’t be there. I said, ‘Don’t you see that I am a female?’ And she said, ‘No, you should go to the men’s bathroom.’ I said, ‘Oh, okay,’ … but I still went to the women’s bathroom. I came out and reported her,” Tere said.
She says a shelter manager used to throw away the clothes of migrants who, like her, identified as queer.
Despite all that, Tere found an apartment and a job, as well as access to the HIV treatment and gender-affirming care that she needs.
But she now goes about her daily routine fearing that everything she has been able to achieve could go away at any moment.
“I came to this country to start a new life, because of the human rights protections we have here [in the U.S.], but with the rules established by the new president, I feel things in the country are very tough now,” Tere said.
Since Trump was re-elected, he has signed several executive orders targeting trangender people, including declaring the U.S. only recognizes male and female sexes, reinstating a ban on transgender people serving in the military, limiting passport gender markers, moving transgender women into men’s prisons and defunding gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
The Trump administration has also ramped up its monthslong campaign against immigrants, including deporting people without criminal records and ending Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole for hundreds of thousands. Most recently, Trump threatened to send the National Guard to sanctuary cities like Chicago to conduct targeted immigration enforcement. Since January, many asylum-seekers like Tere have been arrested and detained.
Health advocates have also increasingly become concerned about the impact of potential cuts to health care programs that cover the medical needs of immigrants like Tere.
Defending “who I am”
Tere has always known that she is a woman. Since she was little, she wanted to wear her mother’s clothes, have long hair and play with dolls. When she was 8, she remembers liking other boys her age, writing them love letters she never sent that she’d decorate with lipstick kisses.
When her mother found one of those letters, Tere got in big trouble.
“She beat me up really badly,” Tere said.
Her mother took her to therapy multiple times, hoping she would start behaving like other cisgender boys her age. She says her brother mistreated her physically and emotionally because she was trans, forcing her to leave home at 13.
Tere lived with other relatives until she figured out how to be on her own.
“Since I was 15, I have tried to look more feminine,” Tere said. “I had short but thick hair, but then I started letting it grow. Then I started dressing like a woman, and when I was 25, I got breast implants.” She had a job at a retail clothing shop when Venezuela’s economy hadn’t fully collapsed.
But living peacefully in her homeland was an illusion. She was constantly trying to defend, as she says in Spanish, “quien soy”: who I am.
A new life in Chicago
While living in city migrant shelters, she was connected with health care services and given a three-month rental assistance voucher. Although finding a job wasn’t easy even with a work permit, she finally landed a cleaning job at a nursing home on the North Side.
Most of her colleagues are respectful, Tere said, but recently, she filed a complaint with her union because she felt intimidated and mistreated by several coworkers, including by a supervisor. They’ve called her by her deadname even after she clearly established that her name is Tere.
Those passive-aggressive attacks have increased in recent months, she says. “It’s like President Donald Trump is giving people permission to mistreat those who are different,” Tere said.
Right now, she doesn’t even want to watch the news about the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests and deportations happening in Chicago. Like many migrants who arrived in the city in recent years, she entered the country legally under Biden administration rules. Under Trump, she could end up detained in a men’s prison and deported.
Despite the looming threat, Tere doesn’t want to go back to Venezuela. She embarked on a dangerous journey, hoping to find a life in the U.S. free of judgement, attacks and humiliations. Now, she is realizing that finding such a place anywhere in the world might be her lifelong mission.
“I’ve had to be strong. I’ve had to fight alone,” Tere said. “Now, with the current situation [in the U.S.], I’m really scared. But I leave it in God’s hands.”