A Tucson group is calling for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release a transgender woman being held at a detention facility, saying she has been harassed and physically and sexually assaulted.
Nicoll Hernández-Polanco, 24, has been in custody at a male facility in the Florence processing center since Oct. 18, 2014, after she presented herself to the U.S. Border Patrol in the San Luis area upon crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. She immediately requested asylum.
“They can’t guarantee her safety and her well-being,” said Raúl Alcaraz Ochoa of Mariposas Sin Fronteras, a Tucson group that advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in immigration detention.
Hernández-Polanco, who was born a male and has been transitioning to a female, said in an interview that she first fled Guatemala when she was 17 to get away from her stepfather, who had been sexually abusing her after her mother’s death. She lived in El Paso for a time until authorities caught her and deported her, but she decided to cross again.
While in custody, she said she has endured abuse from both detainees and ICE officials in the facility, where she has to shower and sleep in the company of men, being called derogatory names and sexual slurs.
In late October, she said another detainee sexually assaulted her. She reported it to officials, who are investigating the assault, but she said there was no follow-up and that she has to see her alleged attacker regularly in the center.
The incident was “reported to ICE and has been referred to the appropriate authorities for investigation,” said Yasmeen O’Keefe, an ICE spokeswoman, in a statement.
“ICE has a strict zero-tolerance policy for any kind of abusive or inappropriate behavior in its facilities and takes any allegations of such mistreatment very seriously,” the statement also said.
Hernández-Polanco’s case is typical, said Olga Tomchin, a fellow at the Transgender Law Center based in California, who has been working with Mariposas Sin Fronteras.
“We know of no case where a trans woman was housed in a woman’s facility,” she said.
She pointed to an in-depth report produced by Fusion, a news network of Univision and ABC. It said that on average about one of every 500 detainees in ICE detention around the country is transgender, and one in five sexual assault cases involve transgender victims.
The agency has progressive policies to protect vulnerable populations and prevent rape, Tomchin said. But whether or not those policies are being followed on local levels is questionable, she said.
According to ICE’s detention standards, “placement decisions should not be based solely on the identity documents or physical anatomy of the detainee, and a detainee’s self-identification of his/her gender shall always be taken into consideration as well,” which are identical to the regulations under the Prison Rape Elimination Act.
“If ICE doesn’t follow its own policies around prison rape, then prison rape happens,” Tomchin said.
O’Keefe, the ICE spokeswoman, said a full-time detention services manager is assigned to the Florence center and other immigration detention facilities. Those managers inspect facilities to ensure their compliance with ICE standards, and report to the Office of Detention Oversight in Washington, D.C.
Since 2009, the agency has taken measures to reform the detention system, she said. Some of the improvements, including “reducing transfers, improving access to counsel and visitation, promoting recreation, improving conditions of confinement, ensuring quality medical and mental health care, protecting vulnerable populations, and carefully circumscribing the proper use of segregation” also benefit LGBT detainees, she added.
For most transgender detainees, the only “protection” is solitary confinement, said Aaron Morris, legal director at Immigration Equality, an organization that provides legal services to LGBT immigrants.
“Almost all of our experiences are that (transgender) people have been confined in solitary for at least one day,” he said.
Karolina López, a Tucson transgender woman who spent three years in custody at the Eloy detention center, said solitary confinement didn’t feel like protection. She said she spent six months in isolation and asked to be let out to no avail.
“Really bad,” she said when asked about her time in solitary confinement.
It’s difficult to talk to trans women, who Morris says are “rotting in insufferable isolation” about legal advice or removal defense, he said.
“It’s a strange position for an attorney to be in to try to persuade someone to stick it out in solitary confinement,” he said. But when the alternative is to risk getting sexually assaulted, the trans detainees are left with no choice.
Hernández-Polanco was also kept in solitary confinement for a day, Alcaraz Ochoa of Mariposas Sin Fronteras said. The hope is that she would be released to the care of the group before getting further assaulted or kept in isolation, he added.
Her attorneys applied for humanitarian parole in November, which was denied. Alcaraz Ochoa said the group hopes she will be released before her final hearing in April.
