THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020 15
when someone would get arrested, the
first phone call was to Lorena,” Strangio
said. In 2012, together the two founded
the Lorena Borjas Community Fund,
which gives bail and bond assistance to
transgender immigrants in criminal and
immigration proceedings. This was the
kind of specific need Borjas’s knowledge
of the community could help identify.
At the time, the Obama Administra-
tion was increasing pressure on local po-
lice to coöperate with Immigration and
Customs Enforcement; when immi-
grants ended up behind bars—for what-
ever reason—they faced the risk of de-
portation, and so it was essential to get
them out fast.
Even while Borjas was advocating on
behalf of transgender immigrants, she
was at risk for being deported herself. Acouple of years into the friendship, Bor-
jas finally asked Egyes to look at her own
case. Egyes joined the effort to vacate
her convictions—it worked with some
but not all of them—and eventually filed
a petition for a pardon. In her letter to
Governor Andrew Cuomo, Egyes de-
scribed some of the work that Borjas had
done. “At meeting after meeting with
law enforcement, many clients explained
how Lorena was the reason that they
were able to escape their trafficker,” Egyes
wrote. “At one point, former Assistant
United States Attorney, [name redacted],
asked if Lorena was a real person be-
cause she seemed to help so many peo-
ple but wasn’t affiliated with any orga-
nization. I explained that Lorena is infact real and that she helps people be-
cause she too was a victim and wanted
to ensure that these girls had a way out
of bad situations.” Egyes attached a list
of more than twenty awards, certificates,
and proclamations Borjas had received
in recognition of her activism. Governor
Cuomo pardoned Borjas in 2017.
Borjas was not paid for most of her
work. She cobbled together a living: she
was paid for some talks, outreach, and
counselling sessions, and sometimes she
cleaned houses. “She made the money
stretch,” Egyes said. “She gave me hope
that people do good things because they
are good people, not because they would
get anything for it.”
“None of her work was with a ‘res-
cuing’ mentality,” Gentili said. “It was,
We help because we help each other.
She was the mother of the trans Lat-
inx community.”
Strangio recalled that, in 2011, Bor-
jas threw a big party for him, complete
with a cake. It wasn’t his birthday or a
date of any other significance. When
Strangio asked what the party was for,
Borjas answered that it was a way of
giving thanks. “She celebrated people,”
he said. A year later, when Strangio and
his then partner were expecting a baby,
Borjas threw them a baby shower. “She
raised money and got us a stroller and
a car seat,” Strangio told me. “I mean,
we are lawyers! But, no, ‘You are going
to have a child, and we are going to take
care of you. That’s what we do.’”
Last year, Borjas became a U.S. citi-
zen. Her work had inspired several non-
profits, including the one that Herrera
runs. “She was starting to see the fruits
of her labor,” Herrera said. And Borjas
herself was finally safe. “She had made
it through the AIDS epidemic!” Herrera
exclaimed. “She made it through the
crack epidemic! She made it through
the violence we faced in the nineties and
two-thousands, with immigration! I
thought we were going to have her until
she was in her seventies or eighties.”
There is a particular gut punch that
coronavirus deaths pack for people who
saw their generation decimated by AIDS.
“When we met, we had a community of
fourteen,” Herrera said. “Recently, there
were three of us left, two H.I.V.-positive
and one negative.” Borjas was positive.
“And now there are only two of us left.”
—Masha Gessenhad found: E.S.L. classes, G.E.D. tests,
community colleges, H.I.V. screening,
immigration lawyers, and research stud-
ies that paid for participation.
Borjas was able to obtain legal status
under a Reagan-era amnesty. But, in the
nineteen-nineties, she developed an ad-
diction to crack, which, Herrera told me,
led to more and riskier sex work and,
finally, to a relationship in which Borjas
was trafficked. She was arrested several
times, making her ineligible to renew her
green card or apply for naturalization.
In the late nineteen-nineties, Borjas
escaped from her abuser. She got clean.
Then she got to work helping people
who hadn’t been as lucky. “In the morn-
ing, she would get up and go to the De-
partment of Health and take free con-
doms there,” Egyes told me. “Then she
might also go to a food pantry. And at
night she would walk around with her
wheelie bag, distributing the condoms
and the food.”
One of Borjas’s closest friends, Ce-
cilia Gentili, who is forty-eight, told me
that she met Borjas in a bar in Jackson
Heights, in 2005. Gentili, who had come
from Argentina five years earlier, was
undocumented then and doing sex work.
A couple of years later, Gentili got a job
at Apicha, a clinic for the L.G.B.T. com-
munity, and asked Borjas to help her
reach out to potential clients. “She said,
‘Come with me to hand out condoms,’”
Gentili said. “We started at 11 P.M., up
and down Roosevelt Avenue. She said,
‘When you give out condoms, you can
give out referrals to your clinic.’” They
walked the streets until three or four in
the morning. At the time, New York
police often used possession of condoms
as evidence in prostitution cases, and
word on the street was that one shouldn’t
carry more than three at a time. So Bor-
jas considered it her duty to replenish
sex workers’ supplies of condoms, a cou-
ple at a time, all night long. “She showed
people that they had family,” Egyes said
of Borjas’s condom-distribution work.
Chase Strangio, the deputy director
of the L.G.B.T. and H.I.V. Project at
the American Civil Liberties Union,
met Borjas more than ten years ago,
when Strangio was working at the Syl-
via Rivera Law Project. Borjas worked
to educate him about patterns of arrests
of transgender women of color. “She was
so connected to the community that
Lorena Borjas