ICE has stopped reporting number of trans people in custody

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Alameda, CA (Prism)

Advocates say the lack of data hampers efforts to ensure people's safety as the Trump administration ramps up immigration detentions

Immigration officials no longer report the number of transgender people in their custody, as advocates warn that the decision hampers efforts to ensure queer people's safety in the nation's rapidly escalating immigration detention regime.

The Vera Institute for Justice recently reported that starting in February, shortly after President Donald Trump took office, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stopped reporting these numbers as part of a biweekly statistical report, despite a 2021 requirement that the agency disclose the numbers.

The decision to stop reporting also comes as ICE has rolled back trans care requirements in contracts with detention centers and removed a 2015 memo governing how the agency treats trans migrants (ironically authored by Trump's current border czar Thomas Homan) from its website. Trump's executive order requiring federal facilities such as prisons and jails to house people based on sex assigned at birth also extends to federal immigration facilities.

Experts, including Noelle Smart, the principal research associate at the Vera Institute, say that the missing data echoes how ICE has disappeared everyday people -- regardless of their legal right to stay in the U.S. -- and obstructs advocates' efforts to assist the trans people those numbers represent.

"The harms of anti-immigrant and anti-trans policies and the harms of detention that are worsening under this administration are just all being compounded, and at a time where we have even less access to just the most basic statistics," Smart said.

The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to Prism's requests for comment.

Some say the disappeared data also signals the Trump administration's efforts to evade accountability as mass detention escalates, aided by a massive budget increase and for-profit prison companies vying for lucrative contracts.

Immigration Equality, a nonprofit that serves LGBTQIA+ and HIV-positive migrants and asylum-seekers, released a report last year that laid bare the abuse queer people face in federal immigration detention. According to the report, subjects typically faced sexual and physical abuse due to their identities, as well as solitary confinement and inadequate medical care, including denied HIV treatment.

Bridget Crawford, director of law and policy at Immigration Equality, said the abuse is especially harmful to a population that routinely flees to the U.S. to escape anti-LGBTQIA+ persecution and state violence across the globe.

"The vast majority of our cases are for LGBTQ+ or HIV-positive people, and the types that you just see across the board from so many places are incredibly high levels of torture, sexual abuse, sexual violence from families and communities," Crawford said. "Also, sometimes people have been incarcerated in their country of origin because of their LGBTQ status. So it's particularly traumatizing to then be put into another carceral setting where they're harassed or mistreated or abused."

But experts warn that Trump's anti-immigrant actions are also putting people at risk outside of the U.S.

The Trump administration's executive order pausing refugee resettlement in the U.S. has left queer people fleeing violence across the globe in life-threatening precarity, as Immigration Equality detailed in a recent report. The report recounts the experiences of a lesbian couple from Afghanistan fleeing the Taliban, a gay Ugandan man trapped in Kenya, and a stateless trans woman trapped in Saudi Arabia.

The report also discusses a Somali trans woman who spent six years being beaten and raped at a conversion camp in Kenya and was murdered shortly after resettlement was paused in January. The woman, named Camilla, was preparing for an interview to be resettled in the U.S., according to the report. Crawford told Prism that a second person was also murdered in Uganda.

In a blow to the U.S.'s one-time reputation as a welcoming home for refugees, many queer migrants don't want to resettle in the U.S. in light of escalating discrimination, according to Senna Seniuk of Rainbow Railroad, an international nonprofit that helps at-risk LGBTQIA+ people settle safely across the globe.

"For folks who have some level of choice about where they may be able to safely get to, I would say that the U.S. is a lower priority," Seniuk said in an interview. "We'll also still see folks arriving here who have no other options. So it is still seen as a place where folks can find some safety, and their situations have to be so dire in order to really make that decision to come to the U.S."

Mainstream news coverage of the plight of LGBTQIA+ migrants began to grow in 2018, after a trans Honduran woman died in ICE custody. Roxana Hernández, who was 33 years old when she died at a New Mexico hospital, passed through the San Ysidro Port of Entry just two weeks beforehand.

According to an official autopsy and other records provided to NBC in 2019, Hernández died of AIDS-related complications due to "untreated HIV" after she was not given necessary antiretroviral drugs.

"Paired with the abuse we know transgender people regularly suffer in ICE detention, the death of Ms. Hernández sends the message that transgender people are disposable and do not deserve dignity, safety, or even life," Isa Noyola, deputy director of the Transgender Law Center, said after Hernández's death in a joint statement with Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement and Organización de Latina Trans en Texas.

And now, as the Trump administration ratchets up its attacks on immigrants and LGBTQIA+ people, among other marginalized groups, reports by queer people of mistreatment in detention continue to make headlines.

Earlier this year, a trans woman held at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba said she was forced to shower and use the bathroom in front of men and was denied any contact with family or legal counsel. In January, a trans woman filed a federal lawsuit against Orange County, New York, after she said immigration officials refused to treat her for a fractured nose, placed her in solitary confinement, and later, in a cell with cisgender men who sexually harassed her at a detention facility in upstate New York. She also sued the federal government over this treatment in a separate case in May.

In what is arguably the most high-profile case, Andry Hernández, a gay Venezuelan asylum-seeker was held in the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador for months after being falsely labeled as a gang member by the Trump administration. After more than 120 days in the notoriously deadly prison, Hernández was finally released in July in a prisoner swap.

But now, Hernandez has returned to Venezuela, the place he fled homophobic violence in the first place.

This story is provided as a service of the Institute for Nonprofit News’ On the Ground news wire. The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) is a network of more than 475 independent, nonprofit newsrooms serving communities throughout the US, Canada, and globally. On the Ground is a service of INN, which aggregates the best of its members’ elections and political content, and provides it free for republication. Read more about INN here: https://inn.org/.

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