Immigration officials to start sending transgender women to the middle of Texas
Fusion - By Jorge Rivas, May 23, 2016
U.S. immigration officials are opening a new detention facility in Texas that will include a unit specifically created for transgender individuals, Fusion has confirmed.
“The facility is expected to house about 700 detainees, including a separate 36-bed unit for transgender individuals,” said Carl Rusnok, a spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE.)
ICE says the Prairieland Detention Center will open in November in Alvarado, Texas, and will operate with the agency’s most advanced care guidelines for transgender detainees. Each detainee will have an individualized detention plan “covering items such as searches, clothing options, hygiene practices, medical care, and housing assignments,” Rusnok said.
Immigrant rights advocates have urged ICE to release LGBT detainees, especially transgender women, because they are more vulnerable to physical and sexual assaults while in custody. The new facility addresses a number of issues to better protect trans women, but immigrant rights leaders say any new detention center is a step in the wrong direction. The advocates want ICE to instead work more closely with community groups that could house trans women.
“[ICE] is talking about the new detention center as if they are providing as a service to the community, and they’re not,” said Isa Noyola, the director of programs at the San Francisco-based Transgender Law Center.
ICE officials estimate that there are approximately 65 transgender women in their custody on any given night...
Another significant concern for advocates is a fear of what happens to these transgender women when they’re released in Alvarado, Texas.
No one knows how the local Alvarado community will respond to news of transgender detainees being detained in their city. But many of the elected officials in the city of Alvarado and in Johnson County pride themselves in their conservative values. More than 25,000 of the county’s votes went to Republican candidates in the latest election, with the majority of votes going to Ted Cruz, the former presidential hopeful who believes allowing young transgender girls to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity is “lunacy.” (Fewer than 4,000 votes in the county for the Democratic candidates, who support more civil rights for transgender individuals.)
ICE officials say they will work with local LGBT organizations in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area “to secure needed assistance and resources from local legal service providers and groups who are able to provide additional programming for transgender detainees.”...
http://fusion.net/story/305117/transgender-ice-detainees-moving-texas/
