There are terrible guards, but there are also “good” ones at Krome Detention Center in Miami. One of those people reached Juan Girón with a letter in the name of Kimberly, the trans girl she met while going to the bathroom and who shouted, “Oye, baby, psss, hello.” Now I can decide that he and Kimberly are friends. He feasted on a scapular and became emotional when he came to the patio, during the hour of sunlight that was allowed to him each day, or when he wrote as if he had always known each other, with the awareness of having had the chance to meet each other.
In the solitary confinement cell where he has been for several days, Girón received the message. “I hope you are well and rested,” says Kimberly, who Girón doesn’t know much about, but only came from Colombia for the same reason he left Nicaragua three years ago: because of the violence. My friend’s news is not good. A police officer was beaten and had to undergo surgery. “They operated on me because the officer took my ribs apart and resuscitated my lungs,” Kimberly wrote. He doesn’t tell you much more and says goodbye: “I’m here, but it’s very difficult because men treat you very badly. Sometimes I get very depressed, but I stop moving forward, life goes on.”
Girón sent him back some words from Consuelo. He has a notebook that his psychologists have allowed him to carry with him to distract himself and allow him to hear that he wants to commit suicide. I can sleep in the lower bed of literature to have nightmares during the night. Le Han prescribed him antidepressants. Girón, 31, managed to leave his country, but he was unable to escape the violence in every place he arrived.
She was 13 years old when she died as a mother and was left in the care of the priest. I was walking at night by a bridge near the Schick office in Managua when a pandillero grabbed him, covered his mouth and played his guitar. It didn’t take long before I was able to tell Dad. “I was called because the man was threatening me and if he did something, he would kill me. This marked me all my life.” I have always been well-groomed. Always say “ugly things.” He was always laughing in your face and shouting “pig”. In 2022, he left his house for one night, without money. “I was afraid for my life and told my father I couldn’t take it anymore. » He stopped crossing the border into the United States. One day, in Honduras, he was raped in a park. “It was terrible. I only asked that it wouldn’t hurt me.” In Tuxtla, Mexico, a stranger approached him on the street and mistreated him.
Now, in Krome, he shouts “maricón”. He is afraid to swim, because a Haitian migrant passes each rat, looks him in the face, insults him. “I was threatened with death, I told myself I wanted to kill myself. I said it wasn’t my fault that I was betrayed here with them. Tell me marica, maricón, female dog. I ignored him, until one day he told me he held me high, that he had stopped. He reported the situation to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in charge of the center, who spoke with the Haitian, who is calmer for the moment.
Girón does not forget that night last July when he had a heated argument with his partner. I was a neighbor from La Pequeña Habana who notified the police. The police ended up arresting him, without papers, and not his young man, an American citizen. Once in custody, they took him to a room and pulled him out of the ground. “They didn’t stop to undress me, tearing my clothes with a piece of clothing, they were like three officers, filming me with a camera in their hand. It was something traumatic,” says Girón.
I’m one of the agents and I tell him I’m forbidding him to send him to a better place. This was the Alligator Detention Center on Alcatraz, a place marked by its consistent human rights violations. I was the first stop before arriving at Krome, the center where the most deaths have occurred this year in ICE custody.
The mistreatment of people from the LGBTIQ+ community in detention centers did not start with Donald Trump. However, on his first day as president, the president signed executive orders that were violated by a larger portion of the community. Among them, the one which tells all federal agencies to eliminate references to “gender ideology”, when at the beginning it was necessary to define people according to the sex assigned to them at birth. He also revoked the 2015 Transgender Care Memorandum, which addressed systemic issues affecting trans people in immigration detention.
“With the rapid expansion of migrant prisons and the elimination of enforcement mechanisms under the Trump administration, this dangerous system is getting exponentially worse,” Bridget Crawford, rights and policy director at Immigration Equality, the national rights organization for HIV-positive LGBTIQ+y immigrants, told EL PAÍS.
Immigration Equality was denied access to the area where transgender people are held at a detention center in Aurora, Colorado, “purportedly due to unspecified security concerns,” Crawford said.
In recent months, the organization has detected a “significant increase” in calls to its hotline from detention centers. “There have been reports of sexual assaults that were not investigated or seriously acted upon by center staff, physical assaults and threats of violence, denial or delay of medical care for HIV, unsanitary conditions, isolation for prolonged periods, lack of food, as well as difficulties in accessing legal advice and preparing their legal cases.”
Scammed and abused
In his house in Táchira, Venezuela, where he is currently with his priests, the stylist Andry Hernández Romero remembers that he was in the Otay Mesa detention center, in San Diego, the rest of the inmates unable to blame him for having buttock surgery. “I was told I had a big ass, that I was a woman, that I had my breasts on. I used that to discriminate against myself. I looked rare because I’m an average amanerado.”
The Venezuelan entered the United States last year through an appointment scheduled in the CBP One application and immediately began being detained by ICE. “At any given time, a person’s sexual orientation is a central point in a detention center or in a prison,” he says. “They told me I had to behave, I was the only homosexual in a cell of more than 100 people. I was mixed with real criminals.”
More than once he wondered what was going on there: “There were serious crimes. But for the United States government, Romero was a member of the Tren de Aragua group, one of more than 200 Venezuelans it sent in mid-March to El Salvador, following the refusal of a trial, invoking the law of Enemigos Extranjeros of 1798. In the feared Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, CECOT, everything was much worse “The same guards told me that I had to marry them to have Salvadoran nationality. They discriminated against me even more than before. »
A month after arriving at the mega-prison, I was sexually assaulted by one of the guards, an episode Romero had to speak about. So, in front of the other CECOT inmates, I was not able to hide for so long. I once said, “Discuss me, but I have to worry about any nonsense.” They agreed and had no problems. “Sometimes they came back without hitting us. That way they carried more of the load, because being there wasn’t easy.”
The most excluded migrants
Since February, ICE began excluding data on transgender people in detention centers from its quincinal reports. As a result, it is only known that at least 47 trans people have been in detention for a long time, with under-recording due to the fact that many prefer to hide their identities to protect themselves. This is part of the administration’s efforts in its attack on the community.
On his first day at Casa Blanca, Trump ordered that people in detention centers be held in facilities based on their sex assigned at birth and not based on their gender identity. So, like Shakira Galíndez, a trans Venezuelan woman detained by ICE in New York, she ended up in LaSalle, Louisiana, a detention center for men, where she was treated like just another person.
I left the United States last year and was arrested in September by ICE agents in Federal Plaza, the building that had become a herd of migrant arrests in Manhattan. “Currently, Shakira is facing an accelerated trial,” says Yonatan Matheus, who from New York is defending the woman’s case with his organization América Diversa. Matheus assures that if Galíndez is deported, “a forced return to Venezuela would expose her to serious human rights violations, given that the Venezuelan state does not guarantee her right to life, to her personal integrity or to the recognition of her gender identity.”
Since then, Immigration Equality has warned of the impact that administrative policies have had on the asylum applications of LGBTIQ+ people, which are often refused. “This has resulted in people being deported to countries where their lives are in danger,” says Crawford, who tells the story of one of his trans clients: “I was waiting for the final processing of their refugee case when Trump closed the life or death program for many LGBTIQ+ people.”
It is also increasingly easy today to find lawyers capable of supporting migrants in detention. The Republican administration reduced funds allocated to these types of organizations and fired all staff at the Oficina de Derechos Civiles y Libertades Civiles (CRCL) and the Oficina del Defensor del Inmigrante Detenido (OIDO).
Andrei Ushakov and Alexander Skitsan, a couple who left Russia last year, do not have enough money to hire lawyers, which would cost them between $8,000 and $12,000. Salieron “huyendo” from the Russian government, says Matheus, who also addresses the case. “Alexandre received direct threats at his workplace, which forced them to flee to protect their lives. »
They entered the United States via CBP One and were arrested. First studied at a center in Calexico, California. In September, they were transferred to another center in Arizona, where they were only allowed to communicate for 30 minutes once a week. They were never able to stay together although they were legally married.
Ushakov, who suffers from a chronic illness that he prefers not to reveal, has limited access to medical care and has had to live in hiding. “I hid; I have to hide my sexual orientation and my health issues because of what it means to be in a place like this,” Matheus explains.
He also insists that there is “a great charge of state homophobia” in these transactions: “These practices should not be understood as isolated individuals, but as part of a system that reproduces exclusion, punishment and dehumanization for those who seek protection.”
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