The Cibola County Correctional Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility, is situated at the edge of Milan, New Mexico, about eighty miles west of Albuquerque. It sits behind a Shell gas station, cut off from the rest of town by a bend in I-40. Behind it lies an expanse of the New Mexican highlands, mostly yellow grass and rusted conifers. Cibola is the only ICE facility in the country with a unit reserved exclusively for transgender women. The trans pod, as it’s known, opened in 2017, and can house up to sixty people, though the population is usually around half that. In late June, twenty-nine detainees in the pod sent an open letter to a Phoenix-based advocacy group, Trans Queer Pueblo, reporting deficient medical care in the facility and abuse by its staff. The letter, which was written in Spanish, said that the medical staff did not provide proper treatment to individuals who are H.I.V.-positive, disabled, or in need of routine medical treatment.

Most of the pod’s detainees signed the letter with their legal names—José, Gilberto, Edwin—and added their chosen names in parentheses—Yoselin, Ruby, Karla. Among the signatures was that of Alejandra Barrera. Barrera was one of the trans pod’s first detainees. At the time of the letter, Barrera had been inside for more than a year and a half, the longest a trans detainee had ever been held at Cibola. Trans migrants spend an average of ninety-nine days in ICE custody, which is more than double the length of other migrants’ detentions, a Center for American Progress report found last year. The long detention periods are primarily a result of the fact that nearly all trans detainees apply for asylum and must wait for immigration judges to rule on their applications. Under the Trump Administration, growing backlogs in immigration courts have slowed this process further.

During Barrera’s initial asylum interview, a Department of Homeland Security official determined her to have a “credible fear” of persecution were she to return to her home country, El Salvador. Barrera also had a worsening medical condition, which was diagnosed when she arrived in detention. (She declined to specify for reasons of privacy.) Rebekah Wolf, one of Barrera’s attorneys, told me that the illness is chronic, negatively affects Barrera’s cognition, and, if left untreated, is likely fatal.

While Barrera remained in detention, she watched dozens of other trans migrants enter Cibola and be granted parole within months, sometimes weeks. Nearly all trans asylum seekers at Cibola are released on humanitarian parole, and most are eventually granted asylum. However, in twenty-two months, beginning in November, 2017, Barrera was denied parole five times and denied asylum. The rulings by ICE, which administers parole, and the immigration judges, who decide asylum, baffled her lawyers. At the very least, she fell victim to Trump-era immigration policies and practices that were designed to limit all manners of entry into the country. She may also have been a casualty of bias and rank incompetence.

In late August, I met Barrera at Cibola, in a windowless room that I later learned served as the courtroom for her asylum proceedings, which took place via video conference with an immigration judge in Denver. During our conversation, she was poised, polite, and confident. She also appeared tired—not sluggish or drowsy so much as suffering from a kind of permanent fatigue. She spoke about growing up in San Salvador, her home country’s capital, and recognizing her gender identity early. “I am sure that, as of the moment I started going to school, that’s when I started developing that woman that is inside of me,” she told me.

Barrera, who turned forty-four in April, was one of eight children. Her mother became her main support system—though her mother “never really agreed with it,” Barrera said, referring to her gender identity. For decades, she kept her feelings secret. As an adult, she worked as a beautician, and later got involved in trans activism, educating members of El Salvador’s L.G.B.T.Q. community about disease prevention and visiting terminally ill AIDS patients in local hospitals. It was perilous work. “We were afraid of reprisals from the government, and also from conservative sectors,” she told me.

Barrera spoke steadily, often with her palms pressed together; her nails were unpainted and carefully manicured, descending in length from her thumbs to her pinkies. She punctuated her speech by regularly flipping her straight black hair, which reached down the length of her back. Her two front teeth were missing; I learned later that she’d had a total of six pulled while in ICE detention, which she described as the result of poor dental care.

Before fleeing to the U.S., Barrera was sexually assaulted by members of the Salvadoran military and the transnational gang MS-13—which has roots in El Salvador—who targeted her based on her transgender identity and outspoken activism. Between 2013 and 2016, MS-13 members beat her five times, leaving scars on her face, scalp, and one of her legs. She told me that she loved her activist work, but, amid constant danger, and unable to find protection in local law enforcement, she feared for her life. In November, 2017, she journeyed to the U.S. border, with her niece Zulay, who is also transgender. They presented themselves to Customs and Border Protection officials at the San Ysidro port of entry, in Southern California, to request asylum. Twelve days later, they were transferred to the trans pod at Cibola.

Wolf, now an attorney with the Immigration Justice Campaign, took on Barrera’s case pro bono. At the time, ICE was administering blanket denials of parole for asylum seekers in its El Paso district, of which Cibola is a part. Anticipating a denial, Wolf did not apply for parole until June, 2018, when her client’s medical situation worsened into what she called “an emergency.” (A month later, a federal court blocked the practice of blanket denials, which had been occurring in five ICE districts, though news organizations have reported that the practice has continued.)

Cibola’s medical staff claimed that they had been providing Barrera with appropriate treatment for her condition since her arrival at the facility, seven months earlier. Barrera and Wolf contend that, although Barrera’s medical documents show that she was prescribed medication, she was never actually given it. In the hope of winning Barrera’s release, Wolf requested that a doctor at the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine review Barrera’s medical records and produce an affidavit. The doctor found that Barrera was administered two treatment courses in a four-month period, beginning in December, 2017, neither of which produced a “clinically satisfactory response.” The doctor also concluded that the disease had likely begun infecting Barrera’s vital organs. In the eighteen months since then, Barrera has received no specialized treatment for her illness.

In June, ICE denied Barrera’s application for humanitarian parole, in part because it had denied Barrera parole once before, the agency said, and nothing in the current request adequately changed the circumstances of her case. Wolf was shocked. According to her records, this was Barrera’s first parole application. Wolf inquired how Barrera could have been denied previously, and ICE sent her a rejection letter dated March 13, 2018. She came to the conclusion that ICE officials had fabricated the document. For one, the senior official who signed it wasn’t in his position on March 13th. Furthermore, the day that ICE claimed Barrera had her original parole interview happened to be Wolf’s birthday, all of which she spent with Barrera, mostly in court; there was no parole interview. (Barrera’s first four parole-denial letters state three different dates for when this original parole interview supposedly occurred.) Wolf said that each subsequent parole denial was based, in part, on this fabricated document. Barrera has no criminal history in the United States and had multiple sponsors willing to take her in upon her release, satisfying two main criteria for parole. According to ICE’s own rules, Wolf argued, Barrera should have been released. (ICE did not respond to requests for comment regarding Barrera’s legal case.)