Trans People Have Disappeared From ICE Records, Against Congressional Orders

President Donald Trump s administration has vanished another inconvenient fact the number of transgender people in immigration detention Immigration and Customs Enforcement quietly stopped reporting how numerous transgender people it keeps locked up in February as the total population of immigrants in detention soared and the agency rescinded protections for trans people The move follows Trump s executive order in January to essentially stop recognizing that trans people exist According to the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice it appears to run afoul of a congressional mandate to review how plenty of transgender and other vulnerable people are being kept in immigration detention The move has complicated advocates efforts to keep trans immigrants safe behind bars where they face a heightened jeopardy of violence and anatomical neglect It s part and parcel of a larger effort to really erase trans people mentioned Bridget Crawford the director of law and initiative for the nonprofit advocacy group Immigration Equality They are not even willing to try to track the trans population despite the congressional mandate Her group circulated a survey last year finding systemic mistreatment of LGBTQ and HIV-positive people in immigration detention About one third of the respondents published sexual and physical abuse or harassment and nearly all announced verbal abuse including threats of violence Majority announced they received inadequate therapeutic care or were denied care outright Advocates and legal amenity providers rely on these statistics even though the statistics are limited Congress directed the Department of Homeland Guard the parent agency of ICE to analysis the number of transgender people in detention starting in according to the Vera Institute The information that ICE published to its website under former President Joe Biden only gave a breakdown on the number of trans people in broad geographic regions Still it established a climb in the number of people self-identifying as transgender from a handful in to as a multitude of as last year That number was almost certainly an undercount experts say since transgender people are reluctant to divulge their identity to personnel for any number of reasons Nevertheless it provided advocates with an idea of where to point their tools and helped them pressure ICE to provide more guidance Advocates and legal system providers rely on these statistics even though the statistics themselves are limited commented Noelle Smart a researcher for the Vera Institute Without regular statistics there s no way to know for sure if the number of transgender people in ICE detention has risen along with the overall population but it seems likely Smart revealed We know in general that transgender people are more likely to encounter the criminal legal system which is a major way that people encounter immigration enforcement through over-policing she mentioned Related ICE Is Erasing Rules That Protected Trans Immigrants Other politically inconvenient information has also gone missing from ICE s website under Trump In when Trump boundary czar Tom Homan was an agency executive under then-President Barack Obama he signed a memorandum on care for transgender people in ICE custody It is no longer available to download The page that previously hosted the document now pulls up a Page Not Ascertained notice The memo disappeared from citizens view in February shortly after the New York Times published an article on Homan s career that highlighted his creation of it When Tom Homan worked for ICE under Obama he signed a memo on care for trans people in custody It is no longer available Homan has claimed that he was pressured to sign the memo ICE did not respond to a request for comment about why the memo is no longer available or whether it remains in effect The agency has also stripped out language protecting trans people from the contracts for three detention facilities as The Intercept revealed in March Last month it deleted references to transgender people from its national detention standards further alarming advocates The broader context is quite alarming especially because the vast majority of our clients have very very strong asylum contends Crawford revealed The vast overwhelming majority have experienced very high levels of abuse sexual assault often torture before they come to the United States The post Trans People Have Disappeared From ICE Records Against Congressional Orders appeared first on The Intercept