During Hispanic Heritage month we are posting items related to notable Latina/o LGBT people and came across the following on the new Executive Director at Immigration Equality.
Immigration Equality announced that Caroline Dessert, a queer Latina who grew up a border town in California, will head the LGBT immigrant rights organization in New York. Dessert has had experience with both advocacy campaigns, like the "No on Prop 8" campaign and litigation. Most notably, she was one of the leaders of a team that prosecuted a for-profit school chain, Corinthians that targeted low-income communities with false information. Dessert previously worked at the California Attorney General’s Office, where she was a Deputy Attorney General in the Public Rights Division.
“I am thrilled to join Immigration Equality, an organization that has brought LGBT and HIV-positive people out of the shadows for decades. We will continue to grow our national asylum program, advocate for real solutions to our country’s broken immigration policies and practices, and expand Immigration Equality’s tradition of empowering LGBT and HIV-positive immigrants across the country,” Dessert said.
Her tenure begins just after the President failed to sign an Executive Order that would have both decreased deportations and allowed more undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows. Recently the organization launched a score-card to provide information on congressional records relating to immigration and LGBT issues in advance of the mid-term elections.