ICE Detention For Women Is Uniquely Cruel

Andrea stood exterior her Florida residence along with her 8-year-old son ready for police to reach one Sunday night time in February. She had known as the cops after a struggle along with her boyfriend grew to become bodily. She stated she had bruises on her face and neck, however the cops arrested her and took her to a county jail in Orlando.

Her household posted her bond, however Andrea wasn’t launched. She informed HuffPost she stored asking the officers why she was nonetheless in jail, however they didn’t give her any info. She was scared and confused. She had by no means spent an evening in jail earlier than. When the cops lastly informed her she was being launched to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Andrea had a panic assault.

Andrea, 32, who’s being recognized with a pseudonym as a result of she fears for her security, was born in Argentina and moved to the U.S. when she was 3 years previous. She has lived within the U.S. primarily her total life, and is at the moment a Inexperienced Card holder with everlasting resident standing.

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When ICE arrived on the county jail, all Andrea may take into consideration was her three children: her 8-year-old, 2-year-old and her 3-month-old who she was breastfeeding on the time. I have to be with my children, she stored pondering.

ICE shackled Andrea’s wrists, ankles and waist, and loaded her onto a bus with a gaggle of different immigrants headed to Krome Detention Middle ― a males’s detention heart in Miami with a protracted historical past of allegations of inhumane situations and sexual abuse, based on Human Rights Watch.

Once they arrived, Andrea stated she and about 30 different girls had been stored in a small room meant for guests as a result of it was the one option to separate them from the bigger male inhabitants. She had no mattress, no bathe, no entry to the outside. There have been no home windows within the visitation room, making it not possible to inform what time of day it was. The ladies had been repeatedly denied entry to a bathe as a result of officers stated it was a male-only facility with nowhere for ladies to wash.

Andrea wasn’t given a breast pump, so she needed to expel her breast milk on her personal. The power offered menstrual pads, however equipped the room of greater than two dozen girls with solely 15 pads at a time. There have been cameras straight above the bathrooms, which the ladies needed to share with the opposite male detainees. Andrea stated the boys would typically stand on tables or chairs with a view to look into the stalls whereas girls had been utilizing them. They’d lick their lips and say vulgar issues to the ladies.

“I felt like a sitting duck,” Andrea informed HuffPost. “There was no kind of privateness wherever. You’re not human once you’re in there.”

Round 56,000 people have been detained in ICE custody on any given day since President Donald Trump took workplace. They’re held within the upwards of 175 amenities throughout the nation that detain immigrants ― a sprawling community of county jails, state and federal prisons, navy bases, and devoted immigration detention facilities.

Lots of the people who find themselves detained are girls identical to Andrea. They known as the police for assist, however native regulation enforcement turned them over to ICE. They languished for weeks or months in overcrowded detention facilities typically not outfitted with gender-appropriate care. They had been pregnant or postpartum and had been provided little to no prenatal or maternal well being care. They had been ripped away from their kids and households, not realizing after they would see them once more.

The Division of Homeland Safety and ICE didn’t reply to HuffPost’s request for remark for this story.

Within the early days of Trump’s deportation agenda, the nation watched in horror as immigrant males had been shackled and flown to a mega-prison in El Salvador. Their humanity was stripped away as guards shaved their heads and crammed them into jail cells to sleep on overcrowded, steel bunk beds. The administration weaponized these photos, utilizing them as fodder to additional the lie that Trump’s immigration crackdown was to guard Individuals from “criminal illegal aliens.”

However we not often noticed photos of girls being detained or deported. The few that had been circulated included Rümeysa Öztürk being pulled off the streets by officers in broad daylight; a woman clutching her newborn in the midst of the road as ICE arrested her; a mom sobbing and saying goodbye to her household after she was detained in immigration court docket.

As of late June, there have been round 22,000 girls in ICE detention, based on information from Detention Reports, a platform that analyzes publicly obtainable information on immigration detention. ICE doesn’t present information on the gender breakdown of individuals in immigration custody, and the company didn’t reply to a number of requests for the data. The truth that nobody appears to know what number of girls are in detention is trigger for concern and inherently a part of the issue, advocates inform HuffPost.

There are an estimated 56,000 immigrants in detention day by day, that means girls make up about 40% of detained immigrants ― possible the biggest inhabitants of girls in detention within the historical past of U.S. immigration enforcement. They have to navigate more and more punitive immigration techniques, that are working with much less and fewer oversight due to Trump’s insurance policies.

“When you’re a lady that lives in a precarious scenario ― you might be afraid of your perpetrator, you might be afraid of deportation, you might be afraid to be despatched to jail, you might be afraid to lose your children ― [it] exacerbates the degrees of violence and the degrees of impunity that we’re seeing on this nation,” Elida Caballero Cabrera, a longtime immigrant and girls’s rights advocate and lawyer with the Ladies’s Equality Middle, informed HuffPost.

“And who’re the folks which can be being affected probably the most? Immigrants, undocumented immigrants, however particularly immigrant girls.”

Ladies face distinctive harms in immigration detention, usually experiencing violence that’s exacerbated by various elements resembling being girls of colour, moms, survivors of gender-based violence or the first caregivers of their households. Immigration attorneys and advocates concern girls will endure the best penalties from Trump’s mass deportation agenda due to points like rampant sexual abuse and a scarcity of correct gender segregation that results in worse situations for ladies. The variety of pregnant and postpartum girls in detention has additionally possible skyrocketed, advocates informed HuffPost, they usually’re more and more involved about insufficient prenatal care, harmful being pregnant outcomes and childbirth situations.

These points are the direct penalties of Trump’s coverage choices to roll again protections for immigrants detained by ICE and Customs and Border Safety. Trump rescinded an immigration memo in Might that was meant to guard susceptible populations, together with limiting the time pregnant and postpartum girls might be in CBP custody. An analogous ICE directive concerning pregnant and postpartum girls remains to be in place, although advocates suspect it’s not being adopted.

A congressional report printed after an April go to to 2 Louisiana ICE detention facilities noticed that the Trump administration “has begun detaining bigger numbers of pregnant girls in amenities ill-equipped to handle their well-being and security.” There have been 14 pregnant girls detained at one facility when Senate Judiciary Committee staffers visited, based on the report. Lots of the detainees described poor medical look after pregnant and newly postpartum girls.

The Ladies’s Refugee Fee just lately traveled to Honduras to talk with deported residents who corroborated that ICE detention is not giving adequate care to pregnant girls, new moms and infants.

There was not less than one being pregnant loss in a detention heart since Trump enacted his mass deportation agenda. Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus had a stillbirth whereas detained by ICE in Nashville, the Nashville Banner reported. Monterroso-Lemus repeatedly had requested medical care when she had ache in her stomach and felt no fetal motion, however ICE brokers reportedly ignored her.

She gave delivery surrounded by federal guards who, she stated, shackled her toes to the hospital mattress. Whereas Monterroso-Lemus was grieving within the hospital, ICE brokers reportedly arrived on the detention heart to attempt to deport her to Guatemala.

DHS and ICE didn’t reply to HuffPost’s request for remark about Monterroso-Lemus’ expertise.

ICE just lately declared hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants ineligible for bond hearings, which can preserve extra folks — together with undocumented pregnant girls like Monterroso-Lemus — in detention for longer intervals. This might put extra girls and their pregnancies at grave danger.

“The well being danger that poses and the situations that exist in detention proper now make people significantly susceptible to actually horrific outcomes,” Zain Lakhani, the migrant rights and justice director on the Women’s Refugee Commission, informed HuffPost.

Native regulation enforcement companies can choose into what are often known as 287(g) agreements with ICE, which empower native authorities to establish and detain immigrants on behalf of the federal company. As of final month, over 730 state and native regulation enforcement companies in 40 states have 287(g) agreements with ICE.

This has had an outsize affect on immigrant survivors of home violence, who’re reportedly not calling the police, going to the hospital after being assaulted or renewing restraining orders towards their abusers. The specter of detention or deportation by native police working for ICE has left many immigrant victims of home and sexual violence too scared to seek help ― fearful they may find yourself like Andrea, detained for months for looking for security from their abuser.

There have additionally been a number of reviews of men impersonating ICE to assault and kidnap immigrant girls. Immigration officers are sometimes seen fully masked and sporting plain garments ― making it increasingly hard to identify who’s finishing up arrests. “ICE’s ways of plain garments arrest, household separations and intimidation simply blur the traces between state and vigilante violence, and put immigrant communities ― however particularly girls ― in grave hazard,” stated Caballero Cabrera, from Ladies’s Equality Middle.

In March, Trump shut down the federal government companies that when monitored detention amenities for human rights abuses, that means severe points resembling sexual violence, exploitation and medical neglect are very prone to go unchecked. The watchdog companies ― typically the only recourse for immigrants subjected to inhumane situations ― had been “bureaucratic hurdles” that had been “roadblocks to [immigration] enforcement,” a DHS spokesperson said on the time.

“That is an intentional motion by the administration and never an unintended consequence to mass detention,” the Democratic Ladies’s Caucus wrote in a July letter demanding an investigation into ICE’s and CBP’s alleged abuse of girls. “Your disregard for ladies’s well being and security is not only a one time occasion, the abuse and neglect are half of a bigger, systemic failure to deal with girls with dignity, compassion, and fundamental medical care.”

A latest WIRED investigation of 911 calls from the ten largest immigration detention facilities within the nation discovered that not less than 60% of the amenities reported severe being pregnant issues, sexual assault allegations or suicide makes an attempt.

Regardless of all this, the GOP’s new tax invoice simply handed immigration officers $165 billion, together with $45 billion for brand spanking new detention amenities and $30 billion to rent extra ICE brokers.

“They’re creating this black field of impunity, the place they’re conserving girls who’re pregnant or who’ve superior well being wants,” Lakhani stated. “There’s nobody awaiting human rights abuses.”

Many ladies have been detained in amenities not outfitted to deal with the particular wants of girls. Earlier than Trump took workplace, there have been solely a handful of immigration amenities that will settle for girls, however that quantity has exploded since ICE started working beneath a mandate to detain 3,000 immigrants a day.

Increasingly girls are actually being despatched to all-male or previously all-male amenities the place overcrowding has made situations horrible for ladies. The variety of detainees at Krome, the place Andrea was held, has elevated by 249% since Trump’s inauguration, based on Human Rights Watch.

Beatriz, an immigrant from Mexico who’s utilizing a pseudonym as a result of she’s going through deportation, noticed the implications of overcrowding firsthand whereas ending a jail sentence at a federal jail in Miami. FDC Miami, which homes each women and men, began detaining immigrants for ICE whereas Beatriz was there. When Beatriz first arrived in April 2024, a number of flooring housed male inmates and one flooring housed feminine inmates. Within the spring of 2025, as extra immigrants had been detained in FDC Miami, the ability moved extra males to her flooring.

She stated FDC Miami cut up the ladies’s flooring in half to make extra room for male ICE detainees, limiting feminine inmates’ motion and entry to recreation rooms.

Beatriz stated the jail guards had been overworked from the inflow of ICE detainees. “Loads of the officers stopped working… as a result of they had been drained and dealing greater than the hours they had been alleged to work,” she informed her legal professional in a name from ICE detention, in response to HuffPost’s questions on her expertise. “Officers began appearing unhealthy with us… as a result of they had been drained. Typically they was of their workplace sleeping once we wanted one thing.”

The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) declined to touch upon the particular situations Beatriz described at FDC Miami, however informed HuffPost that humane therapy of individuals in BOP custody is a prime precedence.

“It’s the mission of the Federal Bureau of Prisons to function amenities which can be secure, safe and humane,” BOP spokesperson Emery Nelson informed HuffPost. “We take severely our obligation to guard the people entrusted in our custody, in addition to sustaining the security of our staff and the neighborhood.”

When Beatriz completed her sentence in June, ICE picked her up and introduced her to the identical Orlando county jail the place Andrea was initially held. She was later moved to a different county jail that rents beds to ICE. She remains to be there, going through potential deportation.

Just like high rates of sexual violence within the U.S. jail system, a scarcity of oversight and deeply disproportionate energy dynamics between detainees and guards usually results in exponentially excessive charges of sexual assault and rape.

“Sexual abuse is a part of the systemic abuse of the immigration detention system,” Stacy Suh, this system director at Detention Watch Network, a nationwide group working to finish immigration detention within the U.S., informed HuffPost.

Sexual abuse and systemic reproductive coercion has usually gone hand-in-hand with the U.S. immigration enforcement machine. In 2020, throughout Trump’s first administration, immigrant girls on the Irwin Detention Middle in Georgia were subjected to extreme and invasive gynecological procedures, together with pointless hysterectomies. The reviews had been later corroborated by a Senate investigation. The non-consensual hysterectomies carried out on immigrant girls 5 years in the past are akin to the U.S. government-backed forced sterilization of Puerto Rican women within the Nineteen Thirties, ’40s and ’50s.

“It’s no shock that when you’ve gotten a complete system that’s designed to dehumanize and punish folks that sexual violence can be rampant in a scenario the place nobody has any privateness,” Suh stated.

Beatriz, now 49, fled Mexico when she was 15 years previous to flee years of sexual and bodily violence. As an grownup, she was convicted of a drug offense and incarcerated for over a decade at a federal jail in Northern California known as FCI Dublin. There she says she was repeatedly sexually abused by Darrell Wayne Smith, one of many jail guards who allegedly used her and different inmates’ immigration statuses against them. He allegedly threatened to alert ICE about inmates’ immigration standing or promised to assist with citizenship in the event that they did sexual favors for him.

Beatriz’s legal professional, Susan Beaty, informed HuffPost Beatriz was interviewed by the U.S. legal professional’s workplace, the FBI and the Division of Justice about her sexual abuse allegations towards Smith. Beaty, a senior legal professional with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice who has labored with FCI Dublin victims for years, stated Beatriz’s story is one among tons of of inmate allegations of sexual abuse at FCI Dublin.

Sexual abuse perpetrated by jail employees at FCI Dublin was so commonplace that inmates and guards dubbed it “The Rape Club.” In a class action lawsuit filed by former FCI Dublin inmates, girls described rampant sexual abuse and exploitation on the facility, together with alleged instances the place jail employees used immigration status to use and abuse inmates.

“The federal legal investigation has made clear that FCI Dublin employees explicitly goal immigrant girls for abuse, leveraging the specter of deportation,” based on the suit, which the U.S. authorities later paid out a $116 million settlement to greater than 100 survivors. “In related situations, officers informed survivors that they ‘appeared of their information’ and knew that they had been topic to immigration detainers, or they threatened to inform immigration authorities if survivors reported their abuse.”

FCI Dublin finally shut down in April 2024 after the director on the time stated she was unable to repair the jail’s points, which included the tradition of sexual abuse. Ten prison guards, together with the warden and chaplain, had been charged with sexually abusing inmates; the bulk have been convicted or pleaded responsible.

Smith, who maintains his innocence, was charged with 15 counts of sexual abuse of 5 inmates ― probably the most counts of the 9 different jail guards, based on court docket paperwork. Smith is accused of masturbating whereas watching girls bathe, forcing inmates to carry out intercourse acts on each other and himself, and withholding mail if girls didn’t present their breasts to him or do sexual favors, court docket paperwork present.

His first trial resulted in a mistrial in April; his new trial is scheduled for September. Beatriz didn’t testify in Smith’s first trial and has not been subpoenaed to testify at his second one.

“He was like, ‘You assume that you simply’re particular? You assume that you simply’re totally different? There’s no distinction. I can go over there [Mexico] and I can discover you,’” Beatriz recalled Smith telling her. “Not even once you’re gonna get deported, once you go to Mexico, you can not even be secure.”

Regardless of Beatriz working with federal investigators to place the FCI Dublin abusers behind bars, ICE detained her instantly after she was launched from jail, and he or she now faces deportation.

Lower than a 12 months and a half after FCI Dublin shut down on account of jail employees utilizing girls’s immigration standing to focus on them for sexual abuse, the Los Angeles Instances reported in February that the Trump administration was seeking to reopen FCI Dublin as an ICE detention heart. The Bureau of Prisons informed HuffPost there have been no plans to reopen FCI Dublin, and ICE didn’t reply to a number of requests for remark.

Immigration advocates and FCI Dublin victims are nonetheless deeply involved that the concept isn’t lifeless, with ongoing protests exterior of the closed federal facility. Some identified that ICE is aggressively looking for mattress area in Northern California because the company at the moment has zero detention amenities within the space.

“The story of abuse at FCI Dublin can also be very a lot a narrative of abuse of immigrant girls,” Beaty, who has represented tons of of FCI Dublin victims, informed HuffPost. “The jail has develop into an emblem of jail employees sexual abuse, and to place anybody again in that facility can be deeply inhumane.”

Beatriz qualifies for a U visa, a part of federal protections to make sure undocumented immigrant survivors who report crimes are offered a path to citizenship. The U.S. authorities declined to certify Beatriz’s U visa, regardless of working with officers within the federal investigation into sexual abuse at FCI Dublin. She’s nonetheless pursuing different asylum paths. If she goes again to Mexico, she’s terrified she is going to face the identical kind of sexual and bodily violence that compelled her to flee when she was 15.

“Dozens of immigrant girls [from FCI Dublin] have reported abuse to federal authorities after which simply been discarded and deported,” Beaty stated.

Ladies who to migrate to the U.S. are 5 occasions extra prone to be looking for asylum from gender-based violence like home violence and intercourse trafficking.

In a major decision this month, the Division of Justice denied asylum to a lady from El Salvador who was a sufferer of gang violence. The ruling alerts that future asylum instances primarily based on gender, like home and sexual violence, will probably be tougher to win ― rolling again a long time of labor acknowledging girls’s rights as human rights.

Throughout the first Trump administration, the DOJ dominated towards an asylum seeker named Anabel on related grounds. The 2018 resolution was finally overturned, and Anabel obtained asylum.

“I’ve felt very glad that my case has been capable of assist different girls escaping related conditions of violence,” Anabel stated throughout a press name with reporters this month. “However now I’m listening to that this authorities is attempting to do the identical factor to a different girl, placing her life in peril, and utilizing her case to shut the door to different girls.”

“Once they inform folks they need to return to the nation they’ve fled, the place there may be a lot violence, many are despatched again to die.”

Andrea was launched from ICE custody 2 1/2 months after she was detained. She spent her first week at Krome, the boys’s facility, then was transferred to a detention heart in Houston, Texas, the place she stayed till April. Immigration officers cited a decade-old hashish conviction as the explanation they detained her, but it surely was finally resolved since her case had been expunged.

By the point Andrea arrived house, her child had began crawling and sitting up on her personal. She was devastated she had missed such huge milestones. Andrea’s boyfriend watched the youngsters whereas she was gone, as did her mom and a number of other different members of the family who had stayed in Florida for practically three months to assist out.

She’s comfortable to be house, however issues merely aren’t the identical. “I get up from nightmares crying. The smallest issues make me cry now,” she stated. “I’m anxious on a regular basis. I can’t eat. I really feel actually misplaced after every part.”

Her children are struggling, too. All three appear to be glued to her facet each waking second, fearful she’s going to vanish once more. Her 2-year-old has a meltdown each time she makes use of the toilet. Her oldest son will get nervous when she leaves the home.

“I did my entire life right here. I grew up right here. I’ve extra American in me than I do Argentina,” Andrea stated. “America is a rustic I devoted my entire life to and it turned its again on me.”

Need assistance? Go to RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.