Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) decided it would be a good idea to send a tweet recognizing LGBTQ Pride Month. “During #PrideMonth, we recognize our #LGBTQ+ employees, reflect on the trials that their community has endured and rejoice with them in the triumphs of those who have bravely fought—and continue to fight—for full equality,” the agency claimed. It did not go well at all for ICE, which was bombarded with responses from advocates who refused to sweep under the rug ICE’s abuses against detained LGBTQ immigrants.
“Remember Roxsana Hernández—the trans woman who died in ICE custody after not receiving proper treatment for her HIV?” asked Lambda Legal. “We do.” BuzzFeed News reported in 2019 that officials had been very clearly instructed to preserve surveillance footage featuring the final days of Hernández, a 33-year-old transgender asylum-seeker who died in the agency’s custody in May 2018. They wiped it anyway, in spite of federal rules stating that officials are required to preserve such materials in case of court litigation.
Karen Hoffman, an attorney who advocates for asylum-seeking children, tweeted a report from The Guardian that highlighted the abuses that LGBTQ detainees are enduring at this very moment, in particular the case of a transgender asylum-seeker who has been detained by the agency for two years now.
Maura Martinez, any asylum-seeker originally from Nicaragua, was beaten by male detainees under ICE watch in 2019. But instead of taking action to protect her, she and a second trans detainee were thrown into solitary, “allegedly for their own safety,” the report said. Hopes that she’d be freed under the new administration have been dashed. “[T]hose of us still detained have been forgotten,” Martinez said in the report.
“Once an ICE attorney asked my bisexual asylum seeker client who was repeatedly gang raped, assaulted, and forced to watch her partner murdered in front of her to ‘prove’ that she was bisexual,” tweeted Haitian Bridge advocate Katrina Bleckley. “They literally screamed at her in the courtroom while she was hysterically crying.”
“Reminder: When the pandemic started, ICE refused to release asylum seekers living with HIV,” Lambda Legal continued. “How do we know this? Because we, along with @IEquality, fought ICE to have them released.” More than two dozen House Democrats also called on the former unlawfully appointed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary to release LGBTQ asylum-seekers from ICE detention, telling Chad Wolf that fear amid the pandemic “is heightened for LGBTQ individuals who are already particularly vulnerable to abuse and mistreatment in immigration detention.”
ICE should be abolished, and critics of that stance love to prop up a dystopian, make-believe image of a nation run amok should that happen. But ICE has only been around since 2003. Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s first official budget fails to ask for any overall reductions in funding for both ICE and Customs and Border Protection, another corrupt federal immigration enforcement agency that has also gotten its kicks from abusing children.
Others on Twitter also noticed that ICE’s tweet allegedly celebrating Pride never mentioned anything about LGBTQ detainees, just LGBTQ employees. My colleague Marissa Higgins has the right idea here about this whole social media disaster:
In a letter released the day of ICE’s very unfortunate tweet, a group of nongovernmental organizations submitted a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and acting ICE Director Tae Johnson “demanding all detained people who are LGBTQ or living with HIV be released from immigration detention facilities immediately.” In a statement, Immigration Equality Legal Director Bridget Crawford said that “[t]hrowing LGBTQ and HIV-positive asylum seekers into prison is cruel, expensive, and dangerous. For transgender and HIV-positive people, it can even be deadly.
“In response to years of consistently documented abuses against the community, the government has implemented ineffective half-measures that have utterly failed,” Crawford continued. “That is why we have demanded that DHS release all transgender and HIV positive-people immediately. No one should ever be locked into prison because they fled persecution based on their sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status. Doing so during a pandemic is a human rights atrocity.”