The Trump regime is erasing the scant protections in place for transgender people in immigration prison, including safeguards against rape, a review of new contract modifications between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and private prison companies shows.
As of January 5, multiple detention centers revoked safety measures and halted medical care for transgender prisoners, including at Bluebonnet Detention Facility and El Valle Detention Facility, both in Texas and run by Management & Training Corporation; Arizona’s Eloy Detention Center and New Mexico’s Torrance County Detention Facility, both owned and operated by CoreCivic; and Folkston ICE Processing Center in Georgia.
A contract modification for the CoreCivic-run Laredo Processing Center says “all transgender guidance provided here is hereby rescinded,” but does not specify what the guidance included.
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Contracts say the purpose of the change is to comply with Trump’s executive order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”; the changes also revoke all diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility language. The six contract modifications were among more than a dozen released the same day, which also include one outlining terms of a new school opening at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, as the Prospect covered last month.
A spokesperson for Management & Training Corporation did not respond to an email request for information, including how many trans prisoners are in the six facilities with modified contracts and whether they plan to revoke safety and care measures elsewhere. Spokespeople for CoreCivic and GEO Group referred questions to ICE, which is run by the Department of Homeland Security and which likewise failed to respond to a request for information. The CoreCivic spokesperson added that the company has a human rights policy that “prioritizes human dignity” and that makes no specific mention of transgender prisoners.
The Trump regime last year made similar contract modifications to strip away trans protections from multiple immigration prisons, advocates said, including at the Aurora detention center, as The Denver Post reported, and at the Buffalo Service Processing Center and the Broward Transitional Center in Florida, as The Intercept reported.
MOST TRANS PEOPLE IN ICE CUSTODY are fleeing the deadly transphobia of their home countries, said Bridget Crawford, director of law and policy at Immigration Equality. She and other advocates noted that there is no reliable count of the number of trans people in ICE prison; the Trump regime began hiding that figure last year by excluding it from biweekly statistical reports. The last report, published on January 12, 2025, counted 47 transgender people in ICE prison. But even that number wasn’t accurate, advocates said, because not every trans person self-identifies. Nonetheless, the number of trans people in ICE prison will grow as federal agents enact Trump’s goal of deporting one million people annually.
As of January 8, there were 68,990 people in ICE concentration camps, a record high. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said 2.6 million people have left the country since Trump began his immigration terror campaign: two million who did so voluntarily and 650,000 who were arrested and imprisoned before they were kicked out.
Trans asylum seekers are typically in the U.S. because they’ve already endured “incredibly high levels of sexual assault,” repeated beatings, and attempted murder in their home countries, Crawford said.
“They’ve endured just the most horrific persecution you can imagine,” Crawford said. “They’re coming here for protection, and they find themselves in immigration detention, which by law cannot be punitive, but we see that it is.” The Human Rights Campaign, for example, found that transgender prisoners and prisoners living with HIV are especially vulnerable; the federal government itself found in 2014 that 40 percent of transgender prisoners reported they had endured sexual abuse, compared to 14 percent of gay, lesbian, and bisexual prisoners, and 3.1 percent of non-LGBT people. Crawford recounted a story of a client, a trans woman from Mexico who eventually won asylum, but only after she survived treatment that could have killed her.
“She was kidnapped, tortured, hung from a ceiling, slashed with knives, raped so many times she had to undergo reconstructive surgery and then put in immigration detention,” Crawford said. “My God, do we have no compassion?”
CONDITIONS FOR TRANSGENDER IMMIGRATION prisoners were already inhumane and deadly, even after years of fighting to get some measure of care and protection, advocates said.
Under 2015 guidance signed by Tom Homan, who was the ICE executive associate director at the time but has since become Trump’s so-called “border czar,” immigration prisons were supposed to “provide a respectful, safe, and secure environment for all detainees, including those individuals who identify as transgender.” The guidance forbade discrimination and harassment based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and promised to provide “effective safeguards against sexual abuse and assault for all individuals,” including ensuring trans prisoners lived and showered in safety. It also promised that trans prisoners could continue their existing hormone therapy after ICE took them into custody, adding that “all transgender detainees must have access to mental health care and other transgender-related health care and medication.”
But those measures have largely failed to ensure trans prisoners’ safety. In 2018, for example, three years after Homan’s guidance, Roxana Hernández, a transgender Honduran asylum seeker, died in ICE custody after officers forced her to endure freezing temperatures for five days. A year later, Johana Medina León, a 25-year-old transgender asylum seeker from El Salvador, died in ICE custody after begging for medical help.
In addition to suffering the highest rate of rape of any population in immigrant prison, transgender prisoners are routinely targeted for abuse of all kinds, said Isa Noyola, an advocate at the Transgender Law Center, who for years visited immigration prisons to assess conditions because the federal government’s data was incomplete. What she saw was targeted abuse of a vulnerable population; in some immigration prisons, for example, staff purports to keep trans prisoners safe by putting them in solitary confinement, a widely acknowledged form of torture that multiple advocates said is common with ICE.
“It was already, prior to Trump, a very, very dark place,” Noyola said, adding that the Trump regime is now blocking stakeholder visits by nonprofit groups and legal groups to monitor conditions. It is also blocking members of Congress from exercising their legal right to oversee the facilities, as it did three Minnesota representatives last week after ICE agent Jonathan Ross executed legal observer Renee Good in Minneapolis. Noem subsequently ordered new restrictions to further limit congressional oversight of ICE prisons.
“We’re not going to know the extent of the violations during this administration,” Noyola said. “They’re just preventing the full story from coming out.”
In fact, there is no way to keep trans people safe in ICE prison in any capacity, advocates said. The best way to ensure their safety would be to release them from immigration prison, especially given that most of them are seeking asylum—a legal activity under U.S. law and duly enacted treaties.
“There’s no way to safely and humanely detain trans people. Putting resources and so much energy to make rainbow- or trans-colored cages doesn’t make sense,” she said. “The structure, the homophobia, the transphobia, all the stigmatization, they want to train ICE officers on pronouns, but that’s not going to really improve the quality of life. The asylum process is already a traumatic process.”
Advocates said it is important to note that while revoking protection for transgender prisoners is part of the Trump administration’s ideological bigotry, it’s also big business for prison companies. The two biggest are CoreCivic and GEO Group, publicly traded companies that publish their earnings. In November, CoreCivic reported that its third-quarter revenue was up more than 18 percent from the same period last year to $580.4 million. GEO Group, meanwhile, reported its total third-quarter revenue was up about 13 percent from the period in 2024, to $682.3 million.