Ensuring Equal Justice for LGBTQ and Immigrant Women in the U.S.
By Isabella Paganini, Advocacy intern
The 70th annual Commission on the Status of Women took place at the UN headquarters in New York from March 9-19, 2026, and is the UN’s largest annual gathering on gender equality and women’s rights. This year’s session focused primarily on “ensuring and strengthening access to justice for all women and girls including by promoting inclusive and equitable legal systems, eliminating discriminatory laws, policies, and practices, and addressing structural barriers.”
The United Nations Association of the National Capital Area, in collaboration with the United Nations Association of Boulder County, held a virtual CSW side event on March 18, 2026 to continue the conversation on how to improve criminal justice outcomes for immigrant women and LGBTQ communities.
This event featured a panel of leading experts and advocates to discuss the challenges facing these communities and how to best support them. We were joined by Darius Edgerton, strategic advisor with Edgerton & Associates; Emily Kleeman, executive director of the Reentry Initiative; Ana Cutter Patel, D.C. Liaison for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR); and McKenna Newsum-Schoenberg, immigration attorney with the Justice and Mercy Legal Aid Center (JAMLAC).
The panelists shared important insights on the major challenges facing immigrant women and LGBTQ communities. From a criminal justice perspective, they underscored the structural barriers to making stability after incarceration impossible, including significant costs of legal and health services, limited bilingual services, difficulties securing housing coming out of incarceration, a lack of gender-responsive services, and the trauma these individuals carry with them. The system’s response currently centers on punishment and surveillance of released individuals, rather than on healing and re-entry. Around the world, criminalization, discriminatory laws, and obstacles to justice represent the main barriers to re-integrating and advancing justice for women and LGBTQ communities. From the perspective of immigrant communities, the key obstacles include fear, inaccessibility, and lack of education of the immigration process.
Moreover, the panelists emphasized the importance of civil society in protecting immigrant women and LGBTQ communities. To name a few contributions of civil society organizations, they enhance visibility of marginalized communities, document human rights abuses, increase public awareness, and hold government officials accountable. Regardless of the size and scale of an organization, the panelists stress that the impact one can have in supporting these communities is immense. They highlight the powerful effects of story-telling, the arts, intersectionality, social media, and leverage politics in advancing a cause. The panelists agree that, above all, it is important to treat immigrant women and LGBTQ individuals as humans and with dignity.
For more guidance, resources, and tools on how to successfully take action, access the UNA-USA’s Advocacy Resources here.
