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As a transgender woman, Channel Ferro Badell has spent her life fleeing discrimination, trafficking and abuse — first in Uruguay, where she was born, then in Argentina, where she is a citizen. But few experiences compare to what she suffered during her time in ICE custody, she told me. “In six months I was taken to six facilities,” she wrote in Spanish in messages to The Marshall Project. “In every one, the situation is the same: Violence is tolerated within ICE.”
The second Trump administration has singled out immigrants and transgender people — among others — for particular scorn and scrutiny. People at the intersection of those two identities have become a target in ICE custody, and many have described harassment, humiliation, assault and denial of medical care in interviews with The Marshall Project and other news outlets. The administration denied the allegations.
Last month, The New York Times spoke to Camila Toro de Paula, a 25-year-old transgender woman who has spent more than a year in an immigrant camp for men despite a pending asylum claim. She and other women in at least 10 ICE detention camps across the country have had their access to gender-affirming hormone therapy abruptly cut off, the Times reported.
“I’m afraid of dying here,” she told the paper.
Lookout News identified at least 20 transgender women that ICE detained across Arizona and Colorado alone, and found that many had experienced devastating effects from a sudden stop to hormone therapy, including “rapid, menopause-like symptoms, spiking suicidal ideation and severe psychological distress.” As one transgender woman told Lookout: “It messes up your body … Like it’s eating you up inside.”
In interviews, emails and letters with more than half a dozen transgender women in three ICE immigrant camps in Louisiana and Texas, as well as court documents and testimonials, I heard stories of sexual assault, constant harassment — both by staff and fellow detainees — and a sense of betrayal that the country where they had sought refuge and safety was treating them like criminals.
“It was humiliating to see myself with chained arms, waist, and legs, like if I were an animal,” said Mia, detained at River Correctional Center in Louisiana, run by the for-profit LaSalle Corrections. She asked The Marshall Project to withhold her last name because she fears retaliation from staff at that facility. She said her Real ID identifies her as female and reflects her current name, Mia, but ICE staff insist on calling her by her previous name anyway.
Toro de Paula, speaking in Spanish in a telephone interview from the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, run by GEO Group, told me that she “came to the United States because I heard that here they respected the laws for trans women.” In New York, she found doctors who prescribed her hormones and helped her begin the process of medical transition. “I felt cared for, protected, loved, respected. And truly, I will never forget what’s happening to me now.”
This month, two transgender men and a nonbinary person held at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, a GEO Group-run ICE facility for women, filed a civil rights complaint alleging that the warden targeted them for an unsanctioned overnight “work crew,” forcing them to work without protective equipment, taunting them about their gender identities, and sexually harassing them.
At the South Texas ICE Processing Center, also run by GEO Group, Ferro Badell said she slept in an open dorm with 70 men, who called her crude names and said things like “I’ll rape you tonight,” or “I’ll tear you to pieces.”
“Sometimes I go two or three days without eating because they make fun of the way I eat, the way I sit, or they simply don't allow me to sit at the table,” she said. She was deported to Uruguay in August. She’s currently being held in a prison there pending removal to Argentina, according to her friend Déa Thatcher.
Other men’s facilities routinely keep transgender women in isolation cells. This is ostensibly for their safety, but also feels like punishment, said several of the women being held there.
It’s well established that even short stints in solitary confinement can be psychologically damaging, especially for people with a history of trauma — which many in ICE custody have.
Irene Flores Mendoza suffers from PTSD and depression related to her childhood in El Salvador, where she was “continually targeted for violence and threats by MS-13 gang members because she is transgender,” according to legal filings by her attorney. She has been in an isolation unit for months. Flores Mendoza said a psychologist had told them that, because of their mental health conditions and medications, they should not spend prolonged periods in segregation. Nevertheless, she said in Spanish that they had remained there so long that “we see shadows and hear voices and suffer delirium.”
The Department of Homeland Security, in a statement, said that “these claims that there are ‘inhumane’ conditions at ICE detention centers are categorically false … No lawbreakers in the history of human civilization have been treated better than illegal aliens in the United States.” The statement also said, “We are NOT wasting U.S. taxpayer dollars to provide hormone therapy to illegal aliens seeking to change their sex.”
Few of the women in these cases would have been held in detention at all before the second Trump administration, say attorneys and former ICE officials.
People with pending asylum claims, for example, were rarely detained in previous administrations, said Allegra Love, an attorney who specializes in asylum cases. “Most trans people have extremely well-articulated claims to asylum in this country,” she said. “The women I work with almost categorically have been victims of police violence, gang violence, sexual abuse. That’s why they’re fleeing their countries.”
The Trump administration’s policy is to detain almost all unauthorized immigrants, regardless of their individual circumstances, and to hold them as long as it takes for their cases to move through immigration court — often months, or even years. But ICE always has the discretion not to detain someone, and prior administrations often used that discretion in cases where an immigrant might be unsafe in detention, said Claire Trickler McNulty, who served as assistant director of ICE and other top positions under Presidents Obama and Biden. “When you were looking at reasons to release people, vulnerabilities like transgender identity would have been part of the decision,” Trickler McNulty said. “It’s not anymore.”
Before January 2025, ICE published the number of transgender people in custody each month, which rarely climbed above a few dozen, according to ICE data archived by the Vera Institute, a criminal justice reform think tank. The Trump administration stopped publishing that data shortly after the president’s second inauguration. But experts say the numbers are likely higher now, because ICE is detaining more people in general.
The current policies are a marked reversal from guidelines the Obama administration issued in 2015, determining how ICE would treat transgender people, including safe housing decisions, access to undergarments that align with their gender identity and access to hormone therapy. The Trump administration functionally rescinded that policy and removed it from the DHS website in February 2025.
Beginning in the Obama administration, transgender detainees had the option to stay in a dedicated housing unit. The first was in the Santa Ana City Jail, in Southern California. Other units followed in Cibola County, New Mexico, and Aurora, Colorado.
The “trans pods,” as they were called by ICE, had many of the same problems that plague ICE detention centers in general. At the time, lawsuits and news reports documented overuse of solitary confinement, medical neglect, discrimination and poor living conditions. But there was a sense of safety in numbers, and a basic validation of identity that’s gone now, said several people who have been in both places.
Irene Flores-Mendoza was detained in the transgender unit in Colorado before it closed. There, she said, “They treat me like Irene.” At the South Texas men’s facility where she is now, “They treat me like a man. You are Ricardo. We cannot call you Irene. You cannot use makeup or nothing here. If you use makeup, you go to the hole,” she wrote to me in a message. “They don't give me razors. They don't give me hormones. They mock me.”