Barbra Perez is a thirty-six-year-old Cuban-born trans woman who works for a lighting and electrical company. She has lived in the United States since she was three years old. On the morning of February 3, 2014, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested her in her driveway as she was leaving for work.They informed her she was being taken into custody over an arrest that happened fourteen years prior, in the year 2000. After being held for two days at the Davidson County Jail in Nashville,Tennessee, Perez was transferred to LaSalle Immigrant Detention Center, a privately owned, for-profit facility operated by GEO Group, in Jena, Louisiana, where she was held for more than two weeks. Like many transgender women in custody, she was housed with men and then placed in solitary confinement, or administrative segregation, “for her own protection.”

Many ICE detention centers are run by for-profit companies like GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).When awarded federal contracts to run immigration detention centers, companies are asked to commit to keeping all the cells (often referred to as “beds”) in their facilities occupied at all times, including in the solitary confinement units. Many human rights organizations have criticized this policy as creating an economic incentive to detain more immigrants and to mete out the harsh punishment of solitary confinement.The following piece is drawn from interviews with Sarah Shourd conducted in early 2015.

We arrived in Jena, Louisiana, in the middle of a freezing night.

We’d been driving for twelve or thirteen hours, and it felt like we’d reached the end of the earth. The other prisoners were sitting together in the back, but they had me singled out, chained hand and foot in a cage made of thick Plexiglas near the front of the bus. When the officer came in to check our names off his list, he asked how many males and how many females were on the bus. The driver pointed to me and replied, “Twenty-seven and a half males,” which was followed by raucous laughter at my expense.

The detention center was called LaSalle. I’d been brought there after three terrible days at a local jail in Tennessee where my “captor” informed me that bail would be unequivocally denied and that I would remain in custody for a minimum of three months. He said if I agreed to take the order of deportation, the judge would release me immediately. When I was taken upstairs to strip, I wasn’t allowed to keep my sports bra or panties. This was the first time I’d worn men’s undergarments since I left my parents’ house in 2002. Mortified, I asked the nurse about my hormone shots. She assured me I would get them once the board approved. Then an officer came to escort me to what he lovingly called the “Sissy Pod.” It was protective custody, but as far as I could tell none of the men there even identified as gay. I was the only woman.