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 many 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people it keeps locked up in February, as the total population of immigrants in detention soared and the agency rescinded protections for trans people.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 report how many 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 risk of violence and medical neglect.
“It’s part and parcel of a larger effort to really erase trans people,” said Bridget Crawford, the director of law and policy 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 released a survey last year finding “systemic” mistreatment of LGBTQ+ and HIV-positive people in immigration detention. About one third of the respondents reported sexual and physical abuse or harassment, and nearly all reported verbal abuse, including threats of violence. Most said they received inadequate medical care or were denied care outright.
“Advocates and legal service providers rely on these statistics, even though the statistics are limited.”
Congress directed the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE, to report the number of transgender people in detention starting in 2021, according to the Vera Institute.
The data 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 showed a climb in the number of people self-identifying as transgender from a handful in 2021 to as many as 60 last year.
That number was almost certainly an undercount, experts say, since transgender people are reluctant to divulge their identity to officials for any number of reasons. Nevertheless, it provided advocates with an idea of where to point their resources and helped them pressure ICE to provide more resources.
“Advocates and legal service providers rely on these statistics, even though the statistics themselves are limited,” said Noelle Smart, a researcher for the Vera Institute.
Without regular data, 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 said.
“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 said.
Other politically inconvenient information has also gone missing from ICE’s website under Trump. In 2015, when Trump border 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 Found” notice. The memo disappeared from public 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 reported 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 claims,” Crawford said. “The vast, overwhelming majority have experienced very high levels of abuse, sexual assault, often torture before they come to the United States.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
