The privately operated immigration detention facility that quietly transferred out nearly 30 transgender people this past January consistently failed to provide detainees with adequate medical attention and treatment—including access to blood pressure medication and hormones—in hundreds of instances, Reuters reports. “Details of the inspections of the transgender unit at the Cibola County Correctional Center in New Mexico, which have not been reported previously, were contained in internal reports from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement health corps and a U.S. Department of Homeland Security civil rights office,” the reporting said.
Those reports include a December 2019 document from ICE Health Corps that described "’several health care-related deficiencies’ at the center, such as failing to complete laboratory orders or arrange for HIV patients to see infectious disease specialists within 30 days of arrival,” Reuters continued. This can be harmful: According to medical experts, patients who are prescribed HIV medication but for any reason don’t take it consistently can end up with resistance to the drug, which “can limit the treatment options that will work for a person.”
Detainees told Reuters they struggled to have their medical needs properly addressed. Zsa Zsa, a Jamaican detainee, described care at the CoreCivic-owned prison as "very poor,” and said she became dizzy when she couldn’t get blood pressure medication. Shantell, a detainee from Honduras, “said she had asked repeatedly for hormones at Cibola, but to no avail,” Reuters reported. “It took her transfer to detention in Washington to get the medication she said she needed.” Those that had the resources put their money together to try to get medication from the prison commissary.
Citing a number of deaths and the agency’s ongoing failure to meet congressional standards to ensure the well-being of this vulnerable group, community organizations and lawmakers had previously called on ICE to release transgender detainees, with over 40 House Democrats saying, “The recently enacted FY2020 Appropriations package includes instructions for ICE to only detain transgender individuals in facilities specifically contracted for their care. Currently, no ICE facilities meet these standards.”
”Transgender migrants and asylum seekers are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment, solitary confinement, physical assault, and medical neglect,” the House Democrats told acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf in their January letter. "These inhumane conditions and systematic abuses are evidenced in countless reports and accounts by [formerly] detained people”—and in the stories of those who have lost their lives while under ICE’s watch, like Roxsana Hernández, a transgender asylum-seeker who died while in ICE custody in 2018.
But instead of releasing Cibola’s detainees to community organizations and sponsors to pursue their cases in freedom and safety, ICE instead transferred them to other facilities, which immigrant rights advocates criticized as a move that “only shuffled the problems to other facilities,” Reuters noted. There are problems awaiting that ICE has itself created: The month before the agency transferred Cibola’s detainees to other facilities, officials lowered detention standards to allow officers to hog-tie detainees and put others refusing medical examination or treatment in solitary confinement.