“My client Kelly has been suffering in a remote immigration jail for more than two years, including months in solitary confinement solely because of her gender identity,” says Tania Linares García, senior attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center, an organization that advocates for the rights of migrants in the United States.
Kelly is a 23-year-old transgender asylum seeker detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“Kelly is one of dozens of transgender immigrants who needlessly endure the indignities and brutalities of immigration detention day in and day out,” added Linares García. She is one of the 93 immigrants who identify themselves as transgender held in 29 U.S. detention centers, according to data ICE gave to Anna Giaritelli, a journalist with the Washington Examiner.
Attorney Linares García made these statements because of a letter 45 Democrat Congressmen addressed to Chad Wolf, acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and Matthey T. Albence, acting director of ICE. The letter calls for the release of transgender migrants in their custody if detention centers do not meet conditions that protect their dignity. They ask ICE to stop putting these people at risk of sexual abuse and assault.
In the letter –which is the result of an initiative led by Mike Quigley, Democrat representative for Illinois and Vice Chair of the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus— the 45 congressmen demand that ICE submit a detailed plan of how it will comply with this requirement, by January 27 2020.
The letter makes the case for the recently enacted FY2020 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which sets standards of care in detention facilities that Democrats say ICE has failed to meet. These models include quality medical care, training staff to be more sensitive to transgender patients, and the creation of safe units where transgender detainees can be held without fear of being targeted by other detainees, Giaritelli reports for the Washington Examiner.
ICE, the letter continues, is required by law to immediately bring facilities that meet these conditions. If not, the agency must then, also immediately, “arrange for release for transgender individuals at risk of sexual abuse and assault in ICE custody, and ensure that such individuals have access to a safe environment and appropriate care upon release,” the letter states.
In 2017, LGBTI immigrants detained by ICE accounted for only 0.14% of the total, but suffered 12% of the sexual abuse and assault that occurred in detention centers,the Center for American Progress study found in a study. “Assuming each report of sexual violence is substantiated and involves a separate victim, LGBT people in ICE custody are 97 times more likely to be sexually victimized than non-LGBT people in detention,” adds the study on which the letter signed by Quigley and the other 44 Democrat representatives is based.
The letter notes that transgender migrants and asylum seekers are not only more vulnerable to sexual abuse, but to solitary confinement, physical assault and medical neglect. “These inhumane conditions and systematic abuses are evidenced in countless reports and accounts by formally detained people.”
This is the case with Kelly.
The letter’s signatories add that solitary confinement of immigrants and transgender asylum seekers is a “pervasive” practice in ICE detention centers. “ICE consistently utilizes solitary confinement for so-called protective purposes or violates its own guidance by using segregation as punishment, placing transgender people at risk of physical and mental health deterioration and vulnerability to sexual assault by ICE guards.”
In 2018 and 2019, two transgender women died in ICE custody.
In May 2018, Roxsana Hernández Rodríguez, a Honduran asylum seeker, died at age 33 from dehydration and complications from HIV. She was detained for 16 days. The autopsy also showed that she had been a victim of physical assault.
In June 2019, Johana Medina León, 25, an asylum-seeker from El Salvador, died shortly after her release from detention due to complications similar to those of Hernández Rodríguez. But she was also denied medical care while in detention. She was detained for more than a month. According to a The Guardian’s Sam Levin report, Medina Leon had asked for her deportation after she was “repeatedly” denied medical care.
ICE spokeswoman April Grant said about the congressional Democrats’ request that decisions about the centers to which they take transgender people are made on a “case-by-case basis”, depending on whether they have ties to the community, personal welbeing and safe. Grant’s statement is reproduced in Giarelli’s report for Washington Examiner.
Kelly, for example, her lawyer Tania Linares García insists, has also been denied medical care and she has been locked up in solitary confinement during her more than two years of detention. “As her attorney, I have filed legal actions on her behalf, but ICE refuses to release her.”
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