Held with men, subjected to slurs: Trans women describe abuse in ICE custody

Transgender women detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement say staff members abused them at a Louisiana processing center.

“Everywhere they call us men, f***ots, very offensive words,” Camila Toro de Paula told Verite News.

The Louisiana outlet spoke to three trans women who had been housed for periods ranging from three months to a year at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena. Their accounts highlight the overlapping hardships LGBTQ+ immigrants face under Trump administration policies, including its push for mass deportations and its policy of housing trans women in facilities designated for men.

The women are now held in solitary confinement for what authorities describe as their protection, according to Verite News. But the women said they had endured months of mistreatment by staff.

An incident report from June describes guards conducting a full pat-down of one of the women, Estephany Rivas. Rivas alleged that a guard lifted her shirt in front of several men as she shouted, “Don’t touch me.” The report consistently uses male pronouns to describe Rivas.

She told Verite News a female sergeant searched under her shirt but never made clear what guards were looking for. “I told her, ‘No, no, don’t touch me. Don’t touch me because I don’t want you to lift up my shirt,’” Rivas said.

The report states that guards ultimately took Rivas to the ground during the search. Her account is among several allegations of mistreatment at the facility that raise questions about compliance with ICE’s National Detention Standards.

“We’ve had a number of clients who have been beaten and permanently disabled by takedowns, so we routinely see that they’re not actually following the use of force guidelines; that they’re using an indiscriminate amount of force when they’re taking people down,” said Sarah Decker, an attorney at the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center.

The allegations in Louisiana follow a series of alleged abuses at ICE facilities across the country. A federal judge in April ordered the release of Karla Saenz, a trans woman who said Arizona ICE officials wrongly denied her proper medical care while forcing her to stay in a men’s facility.

In Minnesota, Alice Valentine, a queer trans woman and U.S. citizen, said in January that ICE officials pepper-sprayed, handcuffed, and jailed her and her girlfriend for showing up to protest.

Concerns about the treatment of transgender immigrants in ICE custody extend to Trump’s first term. Johana Medina Leon, a trans asylum seeker from El Salvador who fled to the U.S. border, died in a Texas hospital in 2019, four days after ICE released her on parole following six weeks in custody.