Arely Westley, an undocumented transgender woman who grew up in New Orleans, spent six months in immigration detention in her youth. She didn’t want anyone else to have to experience the cruelty, confusion and isolation of detention.
After her release, community organizers helped her find safe housing, inspiring her to fight for other trans migrants navigating the system alone. Westley met with trans detainees in immigration facilities across the state to connect them with attorneys, raised commissary funds and campaigned to shut down facilities that had histories of abuse.
In 2024, she was honored by the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Center — recently renamed the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center — for her work, earning its annual human rights award. At the ceremony, Westley spoke about surviving human trafficking, as well as her horrific experiences while being detained.
When Donald Trump returned to the White House last year after campaigning on a platform that denigrated trans people and immigrants, Westley was working as a campaign director at BreakOut!, an organization helping Black and Latinx trans youth. She was in the process of obtaining a special visa for trafficking survivors and had received gender-affirming surgeries. Her home was a place where she felt safe, and she could be surrounded by her 10 dogs, two cats, bunnies and chickens.
She wasn’t particularly worried when she received a call last January from the New Orleans field office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Over the phone, and in a text message reminder reviewed by HuffPost, Westley’s supervisory officer told her they recognized her role as a community leader and wanted to offer her more lenient supervision. Westley had been granted an Order of Supervision in 2024, which functions similarly to probation and allowed her to live in the U.S. while awaiting final deportation orders and an update on her visa — shortly after winning her award.
But when Westley reported to the office, agents handcuffed her. Over the next several months, she was detained at a Louisiana facility where she says she was denied access to medical care, spent long stretches in solitary confinement and was subjected to verbal abuse and transphobic harassment. She said medical personnel at the facility told her they didn’t know how to care for her, and she is still recovering from several infections that went untreated during her detention.
Sarah Decker, a senior staff attorney with the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center and Westley’s lawyer, said people living under an Order of Supervision were “very easy targets” during the early days of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign. (Westley filed — and lost — a case challenging ICE’s use of “ruses” to get her to return to the New Orleans field office.)
Westley, now 33, was born in Honduras, but in November, a judge ordered her to be sent to Mexico instead because her home country is so dangerous for trans people. She hardly knew anyone when she arrived in Mexico.
“I represent everything that Trump hates,” Westley said over the phone. “I’m an immigrant, I’m a trans person and I’m an activist. I think I was the perfect target for his administration.”
Illustration: Grace Russell for HuffPost
The Trump administration has made it more dangerous to be a trans immigrant in ICE custody over the past year. Though trans migrants have historically faced discrimination in detention, the president’s promises of mass deportation and rolling back trans people’s basic rights have collided with brutal force.
Over the past six months, HuffPost spoke with about a dozen people — including detainees, lawyers and advocates — and reviewed over 1,000 pages of court documents, medical records and emails to uncover new levels of cruelty for trans migrants. Three said they were subjected to serious medical neglect, harassment and solitary confinement for weeks at a time — which the United Nations considers to be a form of torture. All said they felt they were uniquely targeted for abuse for being transgender.
“The Trump administration is taking a very aggressive and violent approach toward immigrants — and that has escalated. We can’t really quantify that because of the lack of transparency, but we know that Trump is targeting migrants and trans folks, and that’s emboldening bigots everywhere,” said Dale Melchert, a senior staff attorney for the Transgender Law Center, a nonprofit law firm.
It’s difficult to fully account for the abuses trans immigrants face under Trump. ICE abruptly stopped providing data on the number of transgender people held in detention, even though Congress requires the agency to publish those statistics. Advocates were previously allowed more access to detention centers where they could visit trans detainees and regularly meet with an LGBTQ+ liaison within ICE to raise concerns. But that access has been curtailed in Trump’s second term, and three Department of Homeland Security agencies tasked with immigration oversight have been shuttered.
“Now we only hear about the harm after the fact,” Isa Noyola, the director of the Border Butterflies Project, a group that assists LGBTQ+ asylum seekers at the U.S. southern border, told HuffPost. “We will never know the depths of the harm happening inside detention centers.”
People in ICE detention can be held for weeks, months or years, depending on their immigration status, legal proceedings and criminal history. Detention centers are not supposed to be punitive, and facility standards indicate detainees should have access to legal representation and medical care.
At the start of his second term, Trump dismantled the few safeguards that were established under President Barack Obama — and continued by President Joe Biden — to protect LGBTQ+ immigrants from sexual assault and medical neglect in detention. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that declared sex to be binary and immutable, and directed immigration detention centers to house people based on their sex assigned at birth, no matter the gender marker on their documentation.
DHS, which oversees ICE, removed all mention of trans people from its detention standards and replaced any references to gender with references to biological sex. ICE deleted an Obama-era memo regarding transgender care from its website, which established best practices for medical care, housing, clothing and bathrooms. An investigation by the office of Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) found over 1,000 reports of human rights abuses over the past year, including 206 reports of medical neglect.
HuffPost has identified at least 10 contracts between ICE and private prison companies that have removed the trans care requirements, citing Trump’s executive order on sex. ICE has spent millions outsourcing immigrant detention to private prison companies such as CoreCivic and GEO Group, which have both been accused of mistreating transgender detainees.
“We will never know the depths of the harm happening inside detention centers.”
– Isa Noyola, director of the Border Butterflies Project
Liza Doubossarskaia, a staff attorney at Immigration Equality, an LGBTQ+ immigration rights group, said it has become more difficult for trans asylum-seekers in particular to find lawyers and win their cases since Trump reentered office.
She spoke about one trans woman who was detained by ICE while in the hospital receiving surgery. Doubossarskaia said agents made fun of her because she’d lost teeth in a car accident. The woman has since been deported to a country in Latin America that is hostile to trans people, and Doubossarskaia has lost touch with her.
“Things were already bad, but generally they’re getting worse without the really robust protections,” Doubossarskaia said.
As ICE’s budget expands, so has the scope of its surveillance and data collection activities, including those involving trans people. DHS proposed a rule last year that would require immigrants to submit DNA testing to prove their “biological sex” in order to receive certain immigration benefits.
Illustration: Grace Russell for HuffPost
Within the first few weeks of Westley’s detention at the all-female South Louisiana ICE Processing Center (SLIPC) in Basile, her health began to decline.
She developed a painful cough that she could not shake after being denied daily medication and supplements she needed to manage a chronic illness, Decker, her lawyer, wrote in emails to ICE at the time. Westley was also not given her estrogen hormone therapy, despite the fact that her body no longer produced sex hormones on its own. Being denied hormone therapy, especially after surgeries to stop naturally produced sex hormones, can cause a range of health issues, including severe gender dysphoria, anxiety, depression, cognitive problems and changes in bone density.
By May, Westley developed what looked like an infection at the site of her vaginoplasty, a surgery she had had the year before to construct a vagina. As part of the post-operative care, Westley needed to insert dilators at least twice weekly. She said she was denied access to her dilators during the first month; once staff finally gave her these tools, Westley was shuttled to solitary confinement to perform the dilations in a more sterile and private setting. Spending any amount of time alone in a cell made Westley feel claustrophobic. Her chest tightened and she felt like she couldn’t breathe, making the dilation process even more uncomfortable.
At one point, she remembers going to use the restroom and seeing her underwear full of discharge. She felt extreme pain. Medical staff told her they were “not equipped to treat her medical needs and have no understanding of post-vaginoplasty medical care,” according to an email Decker sent to the heads of ICE’s field office in New Orleans. Decker stressed that the discharge could be the symptom of a “potentially life-threatening infection.”
Westley said a doctor refused to treat her but asked her uncomfortable questions about her vaginoplasty. In June, a different doctor referred Westley to an external gynecologist, a transgender care provider, and an oncologist to follow up on a colon cancer screening she’d had previously, according to Decker’s emails. But by the time she was deported in November, Westley said, she had not been taken to any of her external medical appointments.
ICE has not paid any of its third-party medical care providers since October, and the agency noted it will not begin processing claims until April of this year. The agency’s failure to pay medical bills has caused some medical providers to stop caring for people in detention, Popular Information first reported, citing an unnamed source. Another administration source told CBS News Atlanta that this has caused some detainees to be denied essential medical treatment.
With fewer providers and a record number of detainees, medical neglect at detention centers is expected to worsen. Immigration advocates worry that, for trans immigrants, who may require more complex and consistent health care, that neglect could be fatal.
In a statement to HuffPost, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin did not answer specific questions about the allegations of trans detainees, but she broadly denied claims of medical neglect in ICE custody. “This is the best healthcare than many aliens have received in their entire lives,” she said. However, she acknowledged that detainees are not given hormone therapy. “We are NOT wasting U.S. taxpayer dollars to provide hormone therapy to illegal aliens seeking to change their sex,” she said.
Thousands of miles away from SLIPC, in Arizona, a 37-year-old trans woman from Iran called Melissa faced nearly identical barriers to medical care for complications due to her vaginoplasty, which she had received more than a decade earlier. (Melissa is being identified by a pseudonym to protect her privacy.)
While in detention at an Arizona detention facility, Melissa said she experienced vaginal bleeding and discharge for two months and did not receive her hormone therapy for four months. Detention facility staff acknowledged that she would “benefit from getting transferred to a facility that provides these services,” according to medical records reviewed by HuffPost. But Melissa was put into medical isolation, a form of solitary confinement, twice when she tried to advocate for care, according to her lawyer, Sahar Jalili Pawelski.
ICE agents poked fun at her dilation tools and threw away her clothing, Melissa said. She was given hydroxyzine, an antihistamine often used to control anxiety and insomnia; she took it, not knowing what it was or how much it would make her sleep.
“I was so out of it, I was just sleeping 24/7. Sometimes I didn’t know if it was daylight or nighttime,” Melissa told HuffPost in Farsi. (Jalili Pawelski translated.)
Melissa had waited years to obtain asylum in the United States, after the so-called “Muslim ban” during Trump’s first term delayed her plans. Five days after Trump was inaugurated for a second time, Melissa was finally at the U.S. border. She had left Iran after being beaten by police and abused by transphobic family members.
As she waited in line at the processing center, she noticed the officers signaling her way and yelling words in English that she didn’t understand.
“They’re saying you have to go to the other line because they’re not sure if you’re male or female,” one woman translated into Farsi. “They are suspicious of your forehead.”
At first, Melissa was confused. Then she felt humiliated and started to cry. Her birth certificate said “female,” and she had received gender-affirming surgeries while still in Iran. But an immigration official had deemed her forehead to be too masculine, which meant she was pulled aside and put in solitary detention.
Illustration: Grace Russell for HuffPost
Solitary confinement is widely used across the immigration detention system. Sometimes trans people are placed in solitary to “protect” them from other people in detention, but it can also be used as punishment.
Melissa was later transferred to another facility, Otay Mesa in California, where she was again placed in solitary confinement. Three days into her stay, she said she was taken to a room with facility officials who began to interrogate her: Had she ever raped a child? Did she want to be with men or women? Did she want to hurt somebody?
“Of the 1,100 people I’ve worked with in detention facilities, this is the first time I’m hearing something like this. It’s never been this invasive or this recent,” Jalili Pawelski said.
“I feel like her mere presence was making them uncomfortable,” she added.
Melissa has since won her asylum case and is staying with a host family in New Mexico. But DHS still hasn’t granted her an I-94, a form that proves her ability to stay in the country. Without it, Melissa cannot work or get a driver’s license.
“I don’t know where to go, I don’t know what to do. From stress, I’m getting more destroyed every day,” she told HuffPost.
Luis Renteria-Gonzalez, a 37-year-old transgender man, alleged he was sexually harassed and abused while in detention at SLIPC in Louisiana. He was forced to work in an “off the books” labor program at the facility, according to a federal claim filed by lawyers at the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, and the National Immigration Project.
Between 2023 and 2025, Renteria-Gonzalez said staff recruited him to be part of a late-night work program. An assistant warden forced him to perform hard manual labor without protective gear. Once, he said, he used an industrial-grade chemical to strip facility floors, and it burned through his shoes and onto his feet. He said the warden picked on him and other trans men, saying, “You think you’re a man? You’re going to work like a man.”
After Renteria-Gonzalez shared his experiences with The Guardian last year, he said he experienced retaliation: He was put into solitary confinement for 40 days and did not receive adequate medical care. While in solitary, he said, he had difficulty getting access to the phones, speaking with his children, mother and lawyer for only a few minutes at a time.
“It’s not easy in here, you know. It’s never been easy, but under this administration, I feel like things are just that much tougher for us,” Renteria-Gonzalez said, speaking from SLIPC.
“I feel like a lot of the words that Trump has used to refer to people like us has pretty much encouraged officers to treat us in any type of way and have no respect for people like us,” he said.
Renteria-Gonzalez has since been deported to Mexico, a country he barely knows. He was brought to the United States by his family when he was 5 years old.
The trans migrants all said they are still struggling to cope with the trauma they experienced.
After a bacterial infection she had contracted while in detention ravaged her feet, Westley said she had to get six of her toenails removed by a doctor in Mexico. She is still recovering from the vaginal infection, which has made it difficult for her to dilate, and she worries that her vaginal canal has partially closed and will not function properly again.
Far away from her friends, her boyfriend and her mom in New Orleans, Westley is navigating life in a new country. She said she mostly stays inside a rental property and gets food delivered, as she’s worried about her safety in a city known for high levels of violence against trans people. Westley hopes to return to the United States, but she knows it may take a long time. In the meantime, she’s continuing her advocacy work, drawing up plans to create a kind of sanctuary home to support trans migrants who get deported to Mexico.
“I FaceTime my animals every day,” she added. “That’s the thing that’s keeping me strong.”
Joseph Heller contributed translation for this story.
