Transgender migrants say they have experienced harassment, discrimination, and flagrant medical neglect that has led to serious health complications while in ICE detention.
Over the weekend, HuffPost published a report based on a six-month investigation into how the Trump administration’s mass deportation policies have collided with its attacks on transgender rights. As Dale Melchert, a senior staff attorney for the Transgender Law Center told the outlet, the administration “is taking a very aggressive and violent approach toward immigrants — and that has escalated. We can’t really quantify that because of the lack of transparency, but we know that Trump is targeting migrants and trans folks, and that’s emboldening bigots everywhere.”
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As part of its investigation, the outlet reviewed over 1,000 pages of court documents, medical records, and emails, and spoke to at least two transgender detainees who, among other abuses, reported significant medical complications resulting from prolonged denial of gender-affirming medical care while in ICE custody.
“We are NOT wasting U.S. taxpayer dollars to provide hormone therapy to illegal aliens seeking to change their sex,” Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said to HuffPost.
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The outlet cites recent reports that ICE has not paid its third-party medical care providers in months, leading to detainees being denied care across the board. But advocates say trans detainees are uniquely vulnerable to complications when denied essential medical care, particularly those like Arely Westley, and undocumented woman who grew up in New Orleans, and Melissa, a trans woman from Iran who HuffPost identified using a pseudonym.
Both Arely and Melissa had already received gender-affirming surgeries that stopped their bodies from producing sex hormones naturally before their ICE detention. In addition to being denied hormone replacement therapy, both say they were, at points during their detention, denied dilators, which are a necessary part of the post-operative care for vaginoplasty. Melissa, who arrived in the U.S. seeking asylum early last year after fleeing anti-trans violence at home, experienced vaginal bleeding and discharge while in ICE detention in Arizona. According to Arely’s lawyer, she too developed what may have been a life-threatening infection, but doctors at the detention center refused to treat her because they had “no understanding of post-vaginoplasty medical care.” Both women say they experienced harassment and ridicule, and both spent time in solitary confinement — which, as HuffPost notes, the United Nations considers a form of torture — specifically because to their status as trans women.
Melissa ultimately won her asylum case, though according to HuffPost, DHS has yet to grant her the form necessary for her to work or obtain a driver’s license in the U.S. Arely, meanwhile was deported to Mexico in November and is still suffering from complications from multiple infections she developed while in ICE detention.
Luis Renteria-Gonzalez, a 37-year-old trans man who was brought to the U.S. by family when he was five years old, told the HuffPost that he was placed in solitary confinement for 40 days after speaking to The Guardian last October about the sexual harassment, abuse, and appalling forced-labor he endured at the South Louisiana Ice Processing Center.
“I feel like a lot of the words that Trump has used to refer to people like us has pretty much encouraged officers to treat us in any type of way and have no respect for people like us,” Renteria-Gonzalez, who has since been deported to Mexico, told HuffPost.
As journalist and historian Garrett Graff explained on a recent episode of The New Yorker podcast The Political Scene, Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” poured $45 billion into the creation of ICE detention facilities around the country, while not allocating any money toward the legal process around immigration. At the same time, Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller has reportedly ordered ICE officials to make 3,000 immigration arrests a day. Given what Graff described as a “months- and years-long immigration case backlog dating back to the Biden administration,” it’s likely some detainee could spend years in these facilities.
As both Graff and HuffPost note, ICE detention facilities are not meant to be punitive. But Graff said he worries that the U.S. is building detention facilities “almost with the express purpose of becoming concentration camps.”
In its report, HuffPost said it had identified at least 10 ICE contracts with private prison companies that removed requirements around transgender care following Trump’s January 2025 executive order, which, among other anti-trans directives, required immigration detention centers to house trans people according to the sex they were assigned at birth. The outlet also cited two companies, CoreCivic and GEO Group, which have faced accusations of mistreating trans detainees.
While Congress requires ICE to provide data on the number of trans people held in detention centers, the agency stopped doing so last July. As HuffPost notes, the administration has shuttered three DHS agencies tasked with immigration oversight and drastically limited advocates’ access to trans detainees. As Isa Noyola, director of the LGBTQ+ asylum seeker advocacy group the Border Butterflies Project, told the outlet, these days advocates only hear about abuses “after the fact.”
“We will never know the depths of the harm happening inside detention centers,” Noyola added.
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