The United States has long been a haven for those fleeing persecution and oppression. But today, the treatment for asylum seekers can be so terrible that some are asking to be sent back to the very countries they were escaping.

This includes women who are locked up alongside men, sometimes the very men they were trying to escape. They are forced to live with the men, even shower with them. Other times, these women are put in solitary confinement—its own form of torture—for months on end, all in the name of protecting them.

This is life for transgender women in U.S. immigration detention facilities.

Johanna Vasquez says being locked up was a nightmare. She was beat up by a male cellmate. Then, guards told her the only safe way to house her was solitary confinement. There, she sat in a 6-by-13-foot cell for 23 hours a day with no human contact and no view of the outside world. She waited for an asylum decision for seven months. By the end, she no longer recognized herself: her long brown hair had been cut off, her body started to change. She feared she was losing her mind as solitary took its toll.

A six-month Fusion investigation found that conditions for transgender women locked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are often humiliating, dangerous, and even deadly.

On any given night, some 75 transgender prisoners are detained by ICE. A significant portion are women who have requested asylum, just like Johanna.

Locked Up Each Night Source: Approximation based on ICE estimates and demographic analysis from the Williams Institute at UCLA

Vasquez was 16 when a man forced her into a field where a group of men made her take her pants off. They violently raped her as they held a machete to her neck, telling her that if she screamed they would kill her.

“Faggot, isn’t this what you like,” Vasquez remembers one of the men telling her as tears poured down her face. They told her they would kill her if they ever saw her again.

She fled to the United States, where she heard life for women like her would be better. But instead of finding asylum, she was caught up in an immigration detention system that she felt tortured her again. It was so bad in fact, that after seven months of being alone in solitary, she broke. She gave up. Vasquez asked immigration officials that she be deported back to the country she had fled 12 years after being sexually assaulted.

She arrived on a U.S.-chartered plane and as she was leaving the San Salvador airport ten gang members kidnapped her. They demanded she lower her pants. And she was gang raped again.

Immigration authorities claim they have one of the largest populations of trans women behind bars in the world. They tout their detention standards, released in 2011, as progressive and boast of “very high level sophisticated” training for guards to protect the transgender population.

By their own standards, placement of transgender detainees should not be based “solely on the identity documents or physical anatomy of the detainee.” The new rules encourage staff to consider detainees’ own gender identity. The same handbook says solitary confinement should be a last resort to house transgender people.

Some advocates say even the facilities that are supposed to follow the new rules, simply don’t. ICE responded that "[b]y definition ICE policy is required to be implemented, and has been.".

“All of these rules exist on paper and I never see them followed and when they are it’s only because ICE knows that journalists and lawyers are about to start calling,” said Olga Tomchin of the Transgender Law Center.

What makes ICE detainees different from prisoners is that they aren’t behind bars serving criminal sentences. Rather, they are locked up, waiting to see a judge who will decide whether or not they’ll be deported. A growing number of state and federal prisons across the country allow for transgender individuals to be housed based on their gender identity, regardless of their genitalia or sex at birth.

An immigration official said that he had never heard of a transgender woman being held with the female population in ICE detention.

“I’m not aware of any placement such as that,” said Andrew Lorenzen Strait, who works to improve LGBT friendly guidelines in ICE facilities. “That has not been something that has been a beneficial policy for housing classification.”