ICE Is Erasing Rules That Protected Trans Immigrants

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is quietly deleting rules for how contractors treat transgender people in immigration detention, endangering a vulnerable population that often faces abuse and sexual assault behind bars.

Over the last month, ICE has altered contracts for at least two detention centers, in Florida and New York, to remove transgender care requirements, according to records reviewed by The Intercept.

Those changes followed President Donald Trump’s anti-trans executive order targeting “gender ideology extremism.”

The Department of Homeland Security office charged with investigating civil rights violations in immigration detention has cited the same executive order to close at least one complaint based on gender identity discrimination, according to an immigrant rights group.

The government’s shifts could deny trans people some of the few tools available for protecting themselves in detention, advocates said.

“While this is not unexpected, it is still incredibly alarming, because the mistreatment of transgender people in immigration detention has been so horrible for so long, and it has been so difficult to combat that mistreatment,” said Bridget Crawford, the director of law and policy for the nonprofit group Immigration Equality. “There are so few mechanisms by which you can guarantee any modicum of protection or medically competent care, and now they are removing even those limited protections.”

Dropped Language

The records show ICE altered transgender care requirements for at least two facilities soon after Trump’s January 20 executive order, although the contract amendments do not specifically reference it.

In February, the agency changed its contract with Akima Global Services, which has a management contract for the ICE-owned Buffalo Service Processing Center in New York. The contract was modified to “rescind/remove all Transgender Care requirements,” according to an entry in the Federal Procurement Data System.

Earlier this month, the agency dropped similar language from its contract with the GEO Group, a publicly traded private-prison company that has cheered Trump’s immigration crackdown, covering detainees at the Broward Transitional Center in Florida.

Also in March, the agency uploaded to its website an undated amendment to its intergovernmental services agreement with the Calhoun County Sheriff’s Office in Battle Creek, Michigan, to delete transgender care requirements for immigration detainees in its jail.

GEO Group and Calhoun County referred requests for comment to ICE. Akima did not respond to requests for comment.

ICE did not respond to questions — including about what motivated the contract changes or which care requirements they are dropping.

One immigration lawyer said that while she had long viewed ICE’s standards as ineffective due to a lack of enforcement, dropping them still sends a chilling message.

“Even if there isn’t a huge amount of language that they are actually stripping from the contract itself, the message is the same. That the lives of people who are trans in that detention center are not valued and that abuse can be carried out with impunity,” said Ann Garcia, a staff attorney at the National Immigration Project.

American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan staff attorney Jay Kaplan said his group would closely monitor conditions at the lock-up in Battle Creek, noting that the Constitution and state law also provide protections for transgender people.

“If it is pursuant to some executive order, an executive order doesn’t usurp federal court decisions. It doesn’t usurp parts of the Constitution,” Kaplan said.

Homan Once “Strictly Prohibited” Discrimination

Trump, in his executive order, mandated that detained trans women be placed in housing with men and ordered federal agencies to “remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology.”

That represents a sharp about-face from the Biden era, when ICE added extensive “transgender care” language to contracts with numerous vendors.

That language often extended far beyond medical care. Sample contract language included with a detention contract in Colorado shows that facilities were required to hold newly detained trans people away from the general population, for no more than 72 hours, until a special committee could decide where best to house them.

The language required the facilities to at least consider placing the detainee in “general housing consistent with the non-citizen’s gender identity.”

It also required the facilities to consider special safety measures, provide appropriate clothing and hygiene products, conduct strip-searches in private, refer to detainees by their preferred pronouns, and have access to “transgender-related health care based on medical need.”

Moreover, the committees considering the transgender detainee’s conditions were supposed to regularly reconvene and review reports of mistreatment.

The sample contract reflects a memo issued by Trump border czar Tom Homan during an earlier part of his career in 2015, when he was executive assistant director of ICE’s Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations under Barack Obama.

That memo laid out protections for trans people in custody, including the committees, and stated that “Discrimination or harassment of any kind based on a detainee’s actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity is strictly prohibited.”

The memo vanished in February from its long-standing address on ICE’s website, according to Internet Archive captures. ICE did not comment on whether it remains effective.

Dire Need

Transgender people make up a tiny fraction of those in immigration custody — perhaps a few dozen on any given day. But there have been long-standing reports of physical and sexual assault, prolonged solitary confinement, verbal abuse from staff and fellow detainees, and the denial of medical care such as HIV medication and hormone therapy.

Immigration Equality and other groups issued a report last June, based on interviews with 41 people who are LGBTQ or living with HIV, calling for the government to phase out immigration detention entirely.

While many advocates saw Homan’s 2015 memo as imperfect, they said that at the very least it should be included in binding contracts with the corporations and local governments that own or operate detention facilities for profit. The Biden administration amended numerous contracts in 2022 and 2023.

Homan’s memo, and the contract language, provided detainees with something to point to when they filed complaints with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, attorneys said.

Muffling the Watchdog

That office was charged with investigating complaints about civil rights violations, including those related to gender orientation.

However, Immigration Equality says the office recently closed a case related to gender identity discrimination by citing Trump’s executive order.

That raised the disturbing possibility that the agency will no longer investigate complaints based on gender identity discrimination, Immigration Equality lawyer Liza Doubossarskaia said.

DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

Even if DHS policy has not changed to prevent trans people from lodging discrimination complaints, there may be no one around to investigate them. Last week, DHS said it would be reducing staff in the civil rights office to a bare minimum.

“There isn’t anyone to complain to who can take meaningful action right now,” Doubossarskaia said. “It’s scary. I’m just worried about what is going to happen to people.”