“I was at a jail and he was a migration officer,” 19-year-old “E.D,” an asylum-seeker and mom of a toddler, said about being sexually assaulted while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in Pennsylvania in 2014. “It’s like they order you to do something and you have to do it.”
E.D. hasn’t been alone. From 2013 to 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received 1,310 claims of sexual abuse from detainees, investigative journalist and filmmaker Emily Kassie writes, including from women detained at T. Don Hutto Residential Detention Center in Texas and Berks Family Detention Center in Pennsylvania.
“Maria,” a Honduran asylum-seeker who was being detained at Hutto, was assaulted by a guard after she was granted bond. “After gathering her belongings, she was escorted to a loading area fenced with razor wire and placed into a cage inside a van.” There, guard Donald Dunn grabbed her breasts and private parts, she said, before masturbating. All the while, her hands were restrained.
Eventually, other women stepped forward and Dunn “was convicted of three counts of official oppression and two counts of unlawful restraint, both misdemeanors. A year later, Dunn pleaded guilty to two additional federal charges of violating the detainees’ civil rights.” In E.D.’s case, her assaulter, Daniel Sharkey, was convicted of institutional sexual assault.
ICE, according to Cassie, claims that the number of reported assaults “is relatively low.” But according to advocacy group CIVIC last year, “Homeland Security received a total of 33,126 complaints of sexual and/or physical abuse from January 2010 to July 2016. Of those, only 225—.07 percent—have been investigated.” Last year, ICE even floated destroying records about immigrant abuse, and only backed down due to backlash.
More recently, Laura Monterrosa, a Salvadoran asylum seeker, said she was thrown into solitary confinement for speaking out about the abuse she suffered while at Hutto. “The ICE official went as far as telling her that he expected her to recant her claim to the media,” her advocates said, “or else she would be locked up again in solitary confinement indefinitely.” Laura was eventually freed.
Other detainees have also cited fear of retribution in their claims, in institutional power dynamics that abusive officials knowingly take full advantage of. “I didn’t know how to refuse,” E.D. said, “because he told me that I was going to be deported.” According to Kassie’s must-watch documentary, E.D.’s immigration case remains pending, while Maria eventually received a green card.
Humane and effective alternatives to family detention exist where families can stay together in safety, but following his barbaric “zero tolerance” crisis, Donald Trump is now seeking to jail families together instead in facilities like Hutto and Berks. These families were are already escaping dangerous conditions in the first place. Instead of finding the sanctuary they longed for in the U.S., the U.S. is putting them at continued, traumatic risk.
