Houston, TexasWhen Kataleya Nativi Baca stepped through the gates at Tijuana’s border crossing into San Ysidro, California, wearing a black mask and tugging a small polka dot suitcase, she was giddy with anticipation. The date was April 8, 2021, and for the past 19 months, she’d been marking time in the Mexican border city dreaming of this moment.

Kataleya, 30, is a transgender woman who fled violence and persecution in her home country of Honduras. She’d imagined the United States in broad, rose-colored strokes—a peaceful country where there was no discrimination, where she could get a job and have a small house to call her own. “Everything is going to change for me,” she recalls thinking. At last, there would be an