Trump deported a transgender woman to Central Africa. She says she has to hide to survive

A transgender woman deported to the Central African Republic says she has been housed in a government complex set aside for men, and that she has been living in fear of expressing her gender identity.

The Associated Press reports that the Trump administration deported Daniela Fuentes to the Central African Republic in August. For Fuentes, a Cuban immigrant who had worked in Miami as a hairstylist and drag performer, the country was completely unfamiliar.

“Everything is difficult here because I have to hide who I am,” Fuentes, 32, told the AP. “I don’t know this place, the people, or the language. I have no idea what will happen to me.”

Related: U.S. deports gay asylum seeker to country where homosexuality is illegal

The Central African Republic is one of at least 12 African countries that signed agreements with the Trump administration to take deportees from other countries. The United States Supreme Court upheld that policy last month.

Third-country deportations, which are new under Trump’s second term, present particular risks for LGBTQ+ immigrants, who may be deported to countries that lack protections for LGBTQ+ individuals, or outright criminalize LGBTQ+ identity. The Central African Republic, for example, lacks legal protections for LGBTQ+ people and has even imposed prison sentences for public displays of affection between people of the same gender.

The Trump administration has deported more than 25,000 people across 29 countries to which they have no ties, according to Third Country Deportation Watch, a project by the organizations Refugees International and Human Rights First.

Fuentes moved to the U.S. under the Biden administration through a humanitarian-grounds immigration policy, the AP writes.

She was detained by immigration authorities this year and sent to an immigration facility for men. “When I learned that they were going to put me with men, I almost fainted,” she said.

Related: LGBTQ+ migrants sought safety in the U.S. Trump sent them to dangerous countries they’d never known

The U.S. does not repatriate Cuban citizens, so Fuentes was deported to the Central African Republic, where she was again housed with men. She said that she has stopped wearing women’s clothes and expressing her gender identity, and is unable to work and seldom leaves the housing complex.

“My whole life, my whole identity, was taken away from me,” Fuentes said.

Fuentes has applied to return to Cuba, and said Cuba has agreed to accept her return, according to the AP. Advocates say her case is part of a larger issue that will continue to put LGBTQ+ people who are deported at risk.

“These are not bureaucratic errors or isolated incidents,” Bridget Crawford, who works for the LGBTQ+ immigration nonprofit Immigration Equality, told the AP. “They are the predictable result of policies that purposefully abandon our legal and moral obligation to protect LGBTQ+ immigrants fleeing persecution.”