“Ableism Forms the Scaffolding of our Immigration Laws:” The Rights of Disabled Immigrants Take Center Stage at NCIL’s Annual Conference

Note: The only actual names used in this article are of panelists at the National Council on Independent Living (NCIL) in Washington, DC in July. Avirmed is a pseudonym. 

Avirmed, a Deaf man from Mongolia, faced violence in his home country so he sought asylum in the United States in 2025. He made his way to Mexico and entered the US at the California border. He was detained there for more than four months without access to the only language he knows, Mongolian sign language. 

Avirmed’s experience “equates to solitary confinement,” says Chris Ramos, who is the Latinx and Immigration Community Organizer at Access Living in Chicago. Ramos and researcher Claudia Castillo Alaya presented a workshop about “Defending Civil Rights at the Intersection of Disability and Immigration” at the National Council on Independent Living (NCIL)’s annual conference in Washington, D.C. in July. Alaya is a PhD candidate in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, where her research focuses on structural barriers and community-led strategies at the intersection of disability and migration. 

Because Avirmed had no access to communication, U.S. immigration officials conducted an inaccurate assessment of whether he met the criteria for asylum. Ramos and Ayala say it was a “communication failure [that] became a record failure,” meaning that Avirmed could not give any information for his assessment. Immigration officials created a record that was full of mistakes, including incorrectly identifying where his sister lives in the US, and Avirmed could not communicate the fear he felt in Mongolia because he had no sign language interpreter.

Avirmed’s case made it to the federal court, which ordered U.S. immigration officials to provide a qualified Mongolian sign language interpreter, redo and reschedule assessments for asylum, and make sure he has access to a lawyer.

Ramos and Ayala say Avirmed was harmed by the delays, lack of communication, and the inaccessible and incorrect asylum assessment process. However, if Independent Living Centers (ILC) provided supports to immigrants with disabilities, some of these problems could be avoided, they say. Avirmed is one of 6 million immigrants with disabilities in the US, according to legal scholars Nermeen Arastu and Qudsiya Naqui.

Another NCIL panel on “Expanding Our Movement: Ensuring Independent Living Access for (Im)migrant Communities” discussed the overlapping barriers that immigrants with disabilities face in the US: Immigrants with disabilities may have different cultural beliefs about disability, may not speak English or Spanish, and have just plain fear, especially if they are undocumented. These barriers stop immigrants with disabilities from even asking about the disability resources available to them.

Trust is the overarching barrier for immigrants with disabilities. An audience member from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, which borders Mexico, explained that building trust is even difficult there, where many ILC staff share the same background with Mexican immigrants. The Rio Grande Valley is 90% Latino, with 77% of the population speaking Spanish, according to Rio Grande Valley Health Connect data. 

Elham Youssefian, Director of Disability Inclusion and Accessibility at the International Refugee Assistance Project, says “distrust has many reasons, if you are an immigrant and you feel maybe that most of society doesn’t like you. That you face bullying and that you are a burden. That is something disability communities and migrant communities have in common: Many of us with disabilities feel like we are secondary and that providing services to us is a burden to society. Sometimes we get that feeling from our interactions… So when you are a migrant with a disability, this feeling doubles or maybe triples.” 

Youssefian, who is originally from Iran, says other barriers migrants with disabilities face are: not having computer literacy to do research or fill out an online immigration forms, cultural differences, for example, when a female migrant with a disability cannot receive services from a male ILC staff member, and of course, the stigma of disability that people face everywhere.

Each case of an immigrant with a disability is unique, but many have varying overlapping barriers. For example, Maria Stepanyan, who is Executive Director of the Center for People with Disabilities in Boulder, Colorado, reminded the audience that not every disability is visible. Millions of Americans have chronic illnesses that can be considered disabilities. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 60% of American adults have a chronic illness (about 194 million people).

Stepanyan immigrated to the US from Russia after growing up in Armenia. She has a cognitive disability that causes her to process information differently. She said she comes from the Armenian culture, where “disability is not talked about, especially if invisible,” adding that means “all possibilities are invisible, too.”

Kelsey Bell is the Executive Director at Southwest Center for Independence in Durango, Colorado, and addressed the challenges for immigrants with disabilities in more remote parts of the US, saying “living in a rural area means many less services.” And in smaller communities, disabled people may have less anonymity, so they are slow to trust disability organizations. Word of mouth about a disability organization is significant in rural areas, so one negative incident can affect the whole community.

“You must be intentional to get trust. Everyone at the CIL should be trustworthy,” Bell says. “We want migrants with disabilities to stay and thrive in our communities.” 

Youssefian said to build trust, ILC’s should have immigrants with disabilities on staff and/or build connections with immigrant groups. “Update your ‘About Us’ [webpage] to mention migrants/refugees,” she added, and build this group into the ILC’s planning strategy for the future. 

It is clear that the US is a dangerous place for all immigrants, not just those with disabilities. NCIL attendees from Texas discussed the July 7th ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) killing in Houston of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who lived in the U.S. for 35 years and worked as a homebuilder. His family said he was close to receiving legal status. 

Stepanyan and Youssefian explained that migrants with disabilities in the US are protected by U.S. disability rights laws, just like U.S. citizens. “The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) is for all people with disabilities,” Stepanyan emphasized. Youssefian reminded everyone about Section 504 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act that says, “everything that gets federal funding must provide [disability] accommodation, even ICE.”

Claudia Castillo Alaya, who has disabled children, added that migrants with and without disabilities are affected by their family members’ immigration status. If a disabled person’s main caregiver is deported, that can have grave consequences for the person’s well-being. If families are separated, it causes much trauma, as well as joint income loss. All of this can impact many American citizens. Maria Stepanyan says her mother needs care in the US but her brother’s immigration has been delayed for 17 years.

According to a KFF (formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation) July 2026 analysis, immigrants in the US (both naturalized citizens and noncitizens) make up 30% of long-term care and home health care services, which are primarily used by disabled Americans in nursing homes or in their own homes. “The share of direct care workers who are immigrants varies by state, ranging from 0% in Wyoming to 60% in New York,” KFF reports. 

Since 2022, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has used the “public charge rule” to evaluate whether an immigrant could need government assistance such as Medicaid; they can deny entry based on that evaluation. The Harvard Law School Project on Disability reminds us that the United States is not the only country that treats immigrants with disabilities poorly. “Similar rules around the world also can deny long-time immigrant residents renewals of their status, such as when Australia denied visa renewals to two parents of a two-year-old with cystic fibrosis” in 2024, the Harvard Law School Project on Disability reported.

Legal scholars Nermeen Arastu of CUNY Law School and Qudsiya Naqui of the 

University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law say that ableism has been a feature throughout the U.S. immigration system since the beginning. “Ableism forms the scaffolding of our immigration laws, policies, and practices, but the operation of this pervasive form of exclusion has been grossly unacknowledged and understudied until now,” they wrote in the UCLA Law Review in 2024. 

And there is much misinformation about immigrants from the U.S. government. President Donald Trump blamed noncitizens for much illegal voting in July 2026, claiming 278,000 noncitizens voted. But a Reuters study shows “that federal prosecutors have charged just 129 people under a federal ‘voting by aliens’ statute created by Congress in 1996.” 

Finally, we must consider how much stigma and fear both immigrants and disabled people face in the US. Chris Ramos reminds everyone that “two different things that both exist in the disability justice space and the immigration justice space [are] when it comes to disabilities, nobody decides to have a disability. We all are either born with our disability or we acquire them. And in the immigration space, similarly, nobody chooses to be born where they were born. When you have these two intersecting identities challenged in different spaces, it’s important that we recognize those limitations right off the bat.” 

Feature image: Participants in blue shirts sit outside at the NCIL 2025 Annual Conference and Rally. Photo Credit: Matt Shedd.