On June 8, 2023, Tahirih Justice Center held our annual signature event, Journey to Justice 2023: An Evening with the Tahirih Justice Center. This year’s event celebrated and acknowledged the many years of service and impact that Tahirih’s staff, supporters, and partners, have had on immigrant survivors of gender-based violence seeking safety in the United States.

Today, Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz signed a bill that ends child marriage in Connecticut by raising the legal age for marriage to 18 without exceptions. This makes Connecticut the 9th state to completely end child marriage and the second state to end child marriage this year, after Vermont.

Connecticut saw over 1,200 children marry between 2000 and 2014, and prior to 2017 had no minimum marriage age. They are now the second state to succeed in an incremental approach to ending child marriage: a 2017 reform setting an age floor of 16 and ensuring universal judicial review cut rates of child marriage in the state by about half, mitigating harm while advocates and legislators continued building support for an end to child marriage this year.

Tahirih applauds the Maine legislators who have shown their commitment to addressing child marriage in the state for multiple years, and we look forward to supporting continued efforts to end child marriage in Maine. 

The Biden administration has presented the first-ever U.S. National Plan to End Gender-Based Violence: Strategies for Action, a long-awaited, comprehensive, whole-of-government plan that aims to address and prevent gender-based violence (GBV) in this country.  

The Tahirih Justice Center celebrates this milestone which represents a promise to protect human rights and support safety and justice for survivors of sexual violence, intimate partner violence, stalking, child and forced marriage, and other forms of gender-based violence. This plan is the result of years of work by administration officials and stakeholders like Tahirih who convened listening sessions with the White House Gender Policy Council to share our collective knowledge informed by years of providing direct legal and social services to survivors.  

The Texas Bar Foundation has awarded a $20,000 grant to the Tahirih Justice Center. These funds will help give access to justice for immigrant women and girls in underserved rural regions outside of Houston. The year-long grant from the Texas Bar Foundation will help Tahirih expand a successful, collaborative project with the Fort Bend County Women’s Center to deliver free, holistic, trauma-informed legal services to immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, trafficking, child abuse and other crimes in Fort Bend County, Texas.  

For three years, Title 42 has restricted access to asylum for migrants seeking protection in the U.S. and as it comes to a long-overdue end, the administration has decided to pass a rule that doubles down on illegal and inhumane policies that prioritize deterrence and violate due process. And they are doing so despite outcry from advocates across the country, thousands of comments submitted in opposition to the proposed rule, nearly 80 lawmakers, and condemnation by the asylum officers union.

Under the new asylum ban, migrants most vulnerable to violence and exploitation, including women and girls and other survivors of gender-based violence, will have little hope of finding safety and will languish at our southern border where they are at increased risk of violence, sexual assault, and trafficking.

Tahirih mourns the lives lost in recent tragic events in Texas along with their grieving families. As new information continues to develop regarding the violent incidents in Texas this past week weekend, we can’t ignore the imminent attack on immigrant communities in Texas.