Transgender Women Face Sexual Assault, Solitary Confinement in Immigration Detention Human Rights Watch
go to original March 23, 2016

Dozens of transgender women, including asylum seekers who have come to the United States seeking protection from abuse in their home countries, are locked up in jails or prison-like immigration detention centers across the country at any point in time, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Many have been subjected to sexual assault and ill-treatment in detention, while others are held in indefinite solitary confinement.

The 68-page report, “‘Do You See How Much I’m Suffering Here?’: Abuse against Transgender Women in US Immigration Detention,” documents 28 cases of transgender women who were held in US immigration detention between 2011 and 2015. More than half of the transgender women Human Rights Watch interviewed were held in men’s facilities at some point. Half also spent time in solitary confinement, in many cases allegedly for their protection. But solitary confinement is a form of abuse in and of itself, and many who had spent time there experienced trauma and profound psychological distress.

“Many trans women arrive in the US seeking protection from violent abuse in their home countries,” said Adam Frankel, coordinator in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights program at Human Rights Watch and author of the report. “Instead, they face further mistreatment under detention policies that put them needlessly at risk of violence and abuse.”



Until recently, transgender women in immigration detention were routinely held in men’s detention facilities, where many have been sexually assaulted and frequently harassed by male detainees and guards – the same kinds of abuses that drive many transgender women to flee their home countries in the first place. These women said that they were forced to sleep and shower in the same communal areas as dozens of men, and that guards often refused to protect them and stood idly by without intervening when they were abused.



In June 2015, the US government announced a new set of guidelines intended to improve their detention conditions, making it a priority to place them in units that exclusively house transgender women. The new policy is an important development, but the measures lack an independent oversight mechanism to ensure that they are carried out at individual detention centers, Human Rights Watch said.

Read the rest at Human Rights Watch

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