On October 11, 2014, Jennifer Laude, a Filipina trans woman, was drowned to death by Joseph Scott Pemberton, a Lance Corporal in the United States Marine Corps in Olongapo, Philippines. Pemberton admitted assaulting Laude and deployed a trans panic defense in his 2015 trial. His charge was downgraded from murder to homicide by a judge in 2015, and he was convicted on December 1, 2015. Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte granted an absolute pardon to Pemberton in September 2020.

The Philippines–United States Visiting Forces Agreement, sometimes the PH–US Visiting Forces Agreement, is a bilateral visiting forces agreement between the Philippines and the United States consisting of two separate documents. The first of these documents is commonly referred to as "the VFA" or "VFA-1", and the second as "VFA-2" or "the Counterpart Agreement". A visiting forces agreement is a version of a status of forces agreement that only applies to troops temporarily in a country. The agreements came into force on May 27, 1999, upon ratification by the Senate of the Philippines. The United States government regards these documents to be executive agreements not requiring approval by the United States Senate.