Laura Gómez

The Republic | azcentral.com

The fear Karyna Jaramillo felt when immigration agents took her into custody and placed her in an all-male unit at an immigration detention facility in Arizona is the same fear she says other transgender women feel when their rights are breached by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

During the two weeks she was at the Eloy Detention Center, Jaramillo had to endure “the stares, the obscene words, the whistles and the cat calls” from male detainees.

Read this in Spanish. Leer en español: El reflejo del miedo de las mujeres transgénero en Eloy

Since then, she’s been an advocate for the rights of immigrant transgender women, and while authorities assert policies are in place to guarantee their safety, Jaramillo said the reality is very different.

“We are still abused and tortured. We are still being detained in the same jails as men at risk of violence and abuse,” said Jaramillo, who is defense coordinator with the local group Trans Queer Pueblo, which leads campaigns to get LGBT people out of immigration detention.

Jaramillo's latest campaign is for Nayeli Charolet, a 28-year-old Mexican immigrant who has been detained for more than a month in an all-male unit at the Eloy Detention Center, located southeast of Phoenix.

Charolet is also a transgender woman and an activist in Phoenix with Trans Queer Pueblo.

“We want freedom for Nayeli,” said Danissa Castello, 25, a transgender woman and friend. “We need her out here.”

Inside Eloy, Charolet is exposed to homophobic and transphobic comments, and she’s at risk of violence and abuse by both the male detainees she’s housed with, and the guards, Jaramillo said.

Trans Queer Pueblo and Human Rights Watch have documented cases of abuse, discrimination and assault of transgender women at immigration detention centers nationwide. The main issue is that these women are housed with men, even though they identify as female.

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“I was housed with men, processed as a man: We don’t have the right to express our gender identity,” Jaramillo said. “It was a very hard process for me, those who are working in there harass you instead of taking care of you more than the people you are in there with.”

'You see how much I’m suffering here'

As of March 11, ICE had nearly 50 self-identified transgender individuals in custody, according to an April statement from Yasmeen Pitts O’Keefe, spokeswoman for ICE.

“Of course, these numbers can change depending on apprehension, transfer and release,” Pitts O’Keefe said.

In July 2015, ICE issued new a policy for the placement and care of transgender detainees, asserting the agency “will provide a respectful, safe, and secure environment for all detainees, including those individuals who identify as transgender."

The guidelines state ICE officials have to accurately record if an individual discloses he or she is a transgender man or woman during intake processing. The guidelines also assign personnel to train some staff on transgender-care best practices, and recommend the creation of a “Transgender Care and Classification Committee” to develop a detention plan for every transgender detainee that assesses his or her safety, medical, hygiene, privacy and mental-health needs.

But activists say ICE has never respected the rights of transgender women.

“We are seeing that nothing of this is happening,” said Jaramillo.

Adam Frankel, coordinator of the LGBT rights program for Human Rights Watch, said it’s almost been a year since ICE issued its new guidelines, but the agency’s efforts to implement it fall short.

“Our most urgent recommendation is that transgender women not be housed with men, or in prolonged solitary confinement, given that those types of placement are abusive and dangerous,” Frankel said. “At minimum, ICE should be ensuring that transgender women are safe.”

ICE still places transgender women in all-male facilities, and the new guidelines don’t phase away this practice. Yet, ICE has a facility that exclusively houses transgender women in Santa Ana, California, and, according to activists, Charolet was provided the option to be placed there but she refused because she didn’t want to be far away from her mother in Phoenix.

Blog post: No guarantee of safety and respect

But the Santa Ana facility still doesn’t guarantee safety and respect for transgender detainees, wrote Frankel in a Human Rights Watch website blog post.

“ICE established this unit to keep transgender women safe. But women held there report being regularly subjected to humiliating strip searches by male guards and being denied necessary medical care, including hormone-replacement therapy,” said Frankel.

In response, Pitts O’Keefe said in a statement, “All searches shall be conducted in a professional and respectful manner. ... Strip searches, as opposed to pat downs, must be authorized by a supervisor and should only be conducted when there is reasonable suspicion a detainee is concealing contraband.”

“Additionally, the standards specify that cross-gender searches shall not be conducted unless staff of the same gender is unavailable,” Pitts O’Keefe said.

In a report published in March by Human Rights Watch, the organization concluded many transgender women are subjected to sexual harassment and poor treatment such that they are placed in indefinite solitary confinement as a way to protect them from abuses.

“If the US government is unable or unwilling to ... ensure that transgender women are detained in a setting that is free of abuse and respectful of their specific medical and mental-health needs, Human Rights Watch recommends that it should no longer hold transgender women immigration detention at all,” said the report. The 77-page report, “Do You See How Much I’m Suffering Here? Abuse against Transgender Women in U.S. Immigration Detention,” was based on interviews with 28 transgender women who were in immigration detention between 2011 and 2015, some of them at the Eloy and Florence centers in Arizona.

Pitts O’Keefe said in a statement ICE is committed to the safety and humane treatment of its detainees.

“The agency has a zero-tolerance policy for any kind of abusive or inappropriate behavior in its facilities and takes any allegations of such mistreatment very seriously,” Pitts O'Keefe said.

It's not the first time ICE has faced criticism for the conditions faced by LGBT detainees at immigration centers in Arizona. In June 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona found five cases of transgender or gay detainees who were sexually assaulted or abused from March 2009 through March 2011.

Violence that transcends borders

In most cases, transgender immigrant women are fleeing violence and discrimination in their native countries, according to the Human Rights Watch and local activists.

This is the case of Danissa Castello, native of the southern Mexican state of Morelos, who has been living in the country for 10 years.

“I’m asking for asylum because I suffered violations in Mexico and can’t go back,” Castello said.

Castello, who said she talks over the phone with Charolet twice a day since her detention, said her friend is a woman “who cares about people without worrying about herself. She works at lot ... too much.”

“She is desperate, she’s still waiting for her proceedings with fear of being deported,” said Castello, who was also detained at Eloy from June to August 2015. “I went through the same things as her, I was also detained and they didn’t respect my rights. The guards took a lot of care of me, but they made me shower with men, will give me men’s clothes, and if I needed a bra they wouldn’t give me one.”

The local group Trans Queer Pueblo said Charolet shouldn’t be deported because if she returns to Mexico, she faces the high LGBT-violence rates. Also, Charolet's uncle was recently murdered because he identified as gay, Jaramillo said.

In 2015, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported Mexico was the second country with the most cases of violence against LGBT individuals among member countries of the Organization of American States.

Jaramillo said Charolet is also applying for a U-Visa because she was a victim of domestic violence.

“Let her out, don’t deport her,” Jaramillo said.

The arrest that led to detention

ICE detained Charolet on March 15, Pitts O’Keefe confirmed in an April statement.

“Ms. Nayelie (sic) Charolet was taken into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) custody March 15 after a comprehensive review of relevant databases indicated she falls within the agency’s stated immigration enforcement priorities," Pitts O’Keefe said. “Ms. Charolet was convicted in 2014 of driving under the influence (DUI), an offense which directly impacts public safety”.

Pitts O’Keefe explained that under the new November 2014 guidelines from the Department of Homeland Security — part of President Barack Obama’s move to deport “felons not families” — Charolet is now a priority for deportation.

Attorney Lance Wells, who is in charge of Charolet's immigration case, couldn’t be reached for comment.

Hanging by a thread

While detained at Eloy with only men, Jaramillo had to endure obscenities and sexual advances from other detainees.

Now she dwells on how Charolet is doing.

“I know Nayeli is smart,” she said.

Yet, she feels fear, she feels distress. These feelings have loomed over her from a lifetime facing harassment, violence and rejection for identifying as a transgender woman.

“What if she’s killed? What if she’s assaulted? What if because we are out here making noise they lock her up in the hole?" she asked. "Our lives hang by a thread. ... All lives hang by a thread, but ours are like made of spiderweb."