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By Rachel Savage

LONDON, July 18 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Nahia Riviera was thousands of miles from home in a Norwegian center for asylum seekers last December trying to flee the United States, where she no longer felt safe, when she said she was sexually assaulted.

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Riviera, a transgender woman, said strangers’ verbal abuse, her poor mental health and U.S. administration policies such as a ban on new trans military members left her feeling she had to leave.

“I feel like I’m forced to hide,” Riviera told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone. “(It) was the only option to live.”

Trans asylum seekers have recounted assaults, harassment and abuse in immigration facilities in the United States and Britain and refugee camps in Europe, after being held with men who targeted them for their gender identity.

Of 28 U.S. facilities that held 112 trans people as of May 28, only two were designed to keep trans people separate, but even there they remain vulnerable.