Trans people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody are revealing the horrific conditions they face daily during immigration detention that has lasted months. They report fearing both other inmates and guards, being trapped in solitary confinement (supposedly for their own protection), and being forcibly detransitioned and denied approved medical care.
“The reports of abuse and medical neglect endured by transgender immigrants in ICE custody are horrifying and unconscionable,” Ramiro Sarmiento, National Press Secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, told LGBTQ Nation in a statement.
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“The Trump administration’s deliberate targeting of transgender people and immigrants, and its disregard for their fundamental humanity, represents a shameful betrayal of our nation’s values. Many of these individuals came to the US fleeing violence and persecution because of who they are, only to face the same cruelty at the hands of our government. We are and have been a nation of immigrants, a refuge for the world’s most vulnerable. No one, regardless of their immigration status or gender identity, should be subjected to such inhumane treatment.”
“Everywhere they call us men, f***ots, very offensive words,” one trans woman, Camila Toro de Paula, told Verite News, saying of the harassment and violence that the guards “let it happen.”
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“We don’t have a right to anything here; we trans women don’t have rights.” Earlier this year, in an interview with The New York Times de Paula said, “I’m afraid of dying here.”
Throughout his second term, the Trump administration has attacked immigrants, including those here legally, with aggressive ICE deployment. It has also targeted trans people with endless lawfare. As such, trans and nonbinary immigrants have had the most to fear.
Many of the trans immigrants that have been detained and deported by ICE came to the United States to flee dangerous and traumatic experiences in their home countries. Trans women that Verite spoke with came from Venezuela and Honduras and reported they were seeking asylum after facing death threats and attempted rapes because of their gender identities.
The women said they face regular physical abuse at the hands of ICE agents and have had to suffer aggressive pat-downs and strip searches in front of male guards. In September 2025, a nonbinary person and two trans men filed a civil rights complaint with the help of the ACLU against the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, citing sexual abuse, forced labor, denial of healthcare, and retaliation for speaking up.
The Marshall Project spoke with Channel Ferro Badell, a trans woman held in ICE custody. She reported being made to sleep in an open dorm with 70 men, where threats of nightly sexual assault and violence were common and guards did nothing to prevent it. Badell had to listen to men threaten, “I’ll tear you to pieces” or “I’ll rape you tonight.”
During the Obama administration, trans detainees (of which there were then only dozens) were regularly held in what ICE called “trans pods,” but they were shut down under Trump. Those segregated facilities were far from ideal, but Irene Flores Mendoza, who spent time in both a trans pod and now a men’s facility, told The Marshall Project in Spanish about the stark differences. “They treat me like Irene,” she said of the trans pods. And of where she is now housed: “They treat me like a man. You are Ricardo. We cannot call you Irene. You cannot use makeup or nothing here. If you use makeup, you go to the hole. They don’t give me razors. They don’t give me hormones. They mock me.”
Without the trans pods, ICE officials place trans people in solitary confinement if they find that holding them alongside cis detainees isn’t safe. The dangers of solitary confinement are well documented, with reports showing it can cause hallucinations, psychosis, suicidal ideation, and panic attacks, as well as a myriad of physical problems.
Mendoza, who suffers from PTSD, said when she spoke to The Marshall Project in September that she had been in an isolation unit for months, despite a psychologist warning of the risk to her mental health and saying she should not be kept in solitary. “We see shadows and hear voices and suffer delirium,” she said.
The trans women that Verite spoke to also revealed they were being denied the hormone replacement therapy they had been on before they were incarcerated. That denial has become a common trend for inmates in prisons across the United States after Trump’s 2025 directives to the Bureau of Prisons to stop funding gender-affirming care. The women are also denied appropriate clothes or makeup. “So what we do is use a pencil to paint on our faces,” said Estephany Rivas. “Just because we do that, they get mad and report us. What harm are we doing to them?”
The Department of Homeland Security has removed Obama-era policies from its website establishing basic rights for trans people in detention, and in a statement to The New York Times, they said, “We are NOT wasting U.S. taxpayer dollars to provide hormone therapy to illegal aliens seeking to change their sex.” When Verite reached DHS for comment, the agency claimed that trans immigrant detainees were receiving “the best healthcare many aliens have received in their entire lives.”
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