National Center for Transgender Equality, DC, USA
Monday, May 23, 2016
ICE to Warehouse Trans Immigrants in Texas Despite Calls for Release
By: National Center for Transgender Equality
Fusion
reported today
that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will open a new
“Prairieland Detention Facility" in rural Texas this fall and will send
transgender women to a special unit there. The new private, for-profit
prison will hold 700 immigrants awaiting civil court hearings, including
36 trans women. NCTE joins other advocates in denouncing this plan and
calling for ICE to stop jailing vulnerable immigrants, including those
who are LGBT.
The new “Prairieland” facility, slated to open in November, is in the small city of Alvaredo, 40 miles from Dallas. There are few, if any, supports for trans immigrants released into this rural community, making its construction increasingly problematic. Just as concerning to advocates, Texas sits in the fifth federal judicial circuit, which is notorious for legal precedents that are particularly hostile to asylum seekers. Many LGBT immigrants are survivors of physical and sexual violence who are seeking asylum from anti-LGBT persecution in Central America and elsewhere.
NCTE and a
broad coalition of
local, state, and national advocates have been pressing ICE, which
falls under Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson’s authority, to take
action for years. In March, 36 members of the House and Senate sent a
letter to Sec. Johnson urging him to use the full extent of his
discretion to keep vulnerable LGBT immigrants out of immigration
detention centers. DHS policy already calls for avoiding the detention
of certain vulnerable populations, such as those who are pregnant,
elderly, or have disabilities. A group of House members sent a
similar letter last summer, and NCTE has also participated in
briefings on this issue on Capitol Hill.
A recent
report by
Human Rights Watch found widespread abuse in interviews with dozens of
transgender women detained by ICE, including sexual harassment and
assault, denial of medical care, and solitary confinement. ICE has said
for years that it is addressing transgender people’s needs by making
detention centers safer, but these steps have been
consistently criticized as
inadequate. Last year, ICE announced it would protect transgender immigrants by warehousing them in a few
designated centers across the country, which fails to address the abuse that transgender detainees have consistently reported from ICE officers.
The recent Congressional
letter also called attention to a
2015 report that
found that ICE officers regularly ignored their own risk assessments
and detained LGBT immigrants who could have been released pending a
court date. It asks ICE to provide answers on how it is preventing this
from happening in the future, and how it will implement its current
policies to ensure that trans detainees are not transferred away from
family or attorneys against their will.
Federal studies have shown for years that LGBT people are at extremely
high risk as targets of sexual abuse and other forms of violence in
detention centers.
More than a third of trans people behind bars are sexually abused each year.
Keeping some of the people most endangered by detention out of it would be a sensible first step toward
dramatically shrinking the $2 billion ICE detention system.
http://www.transequality.org/blog/ice-to-warehouse-trans-immigrants-in-texas-despite-calls-for-release