The calls for federal immigration officials to release transgender people from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody continue to grow, following a new letter from a coalition of community rights organizations citing the federal immigration agency continuing to endanger the safety and very lives of transgender detainees. “First: Release is required by congressional directive,” tweeted Heidi Altman, policy director for one of the letter signatories, the National Immigrant Justice Center. “The report accompanying the 2020 spending bill tells ICE it can only detain trans immigrants if it complies [with] its own 2015 directive. ICE is not in compliance.”
In their statement, the group write that the appropriations package for the 2020 fiscal year “states that ICE must limit the detention of transgender people to facilities subject to a contract formally modified in accordance to a 2015 ICE memo which sets out basic minimums of care for transgender people.” ICE’s failure to ensure these standards continues to leave transgender people in prolonged detention and ongoing risk, when many could be released to loved ones or community sponsors because asylum-seekers don’t have to be locked up in the first place.
“Kelly Gonzalez Aguilar is a transgender asylum seeker who has been in ICE custody for more than two years despite her clear eligibility for release on parole,” the letter continues. “Because of her gender identity, Kelly has experienced violence and hatred since she was a child in Honduras. Her experience in ICE custody is a continuation of the trauma she fled when she sought refuge in the United States.”
She’s currently being detained at Cibola Correctional Center in New Mexico, the same facility where another transgender asylum-seeker, Roxsana Hernández, was jailed before her death in May 2018. ICE officials were instructed to preserve surveillance footage that should have showed the final days of her life, but deleted it anyway. “The American people deserve answers for what happened to Ms. Hernandez,” U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Kamala Harris said in requesting a Justice Department investigation, “and members of Congress have sought those answers.“
The letter from the nearly 100 groups follows one sent from dozens of House Democrats earlier this month, which also cited ICE’s ongoing failure to comply with the congressional directive. “Each day that ICE continues to detain transgender people,” they wrote, “is a day that the health and well-being of those individuals is at risk.” Last fall, over a dozen groups called for the release of LGBTQ people and people living with HIV from detention, saying “The widespread abuse and mistreatment of LGBTQ, PLWHIV individuals in ICE custody is well documented.”
Transgender detainees must be freed before yet another preventable tragedy, like the death of Roxsana Hernández, occurs. “ICE is not meeting even its own standards for the care and safety of transgender people in its custody,” NIJC senior attorney Tania Linares Garcia said in a statement. “Protracted detention and cruel practices like solitary confinement and inadequate medical care are particularly widespread among trans detained communities and can have permanent mental and physical consequences, particularly on people who have experienced emotional and physical trauma prior to detention.”