The Folks Being Arrested By ICE That No One’s Speaking About

Andrea stood outdoors her Florida condominium together with her 8-year-old son ready for police to reach one Sunday evening in February. She had referred to as the cops after a combat together with her boyfriend grew to become bodily. She stated she had bruises on her face and neck, however the cops arrested her and took her to a county jail in Orlando.

Her household posted her bond, however Andrea wasn’t launched. She advised HuffPost she stored asking the officers why she was nonetheless in jail, however they didn’t give her any info. She was scared and confused. She had by no means spent an evening in jail earlier than. When the cops lastly advised her she was being launched to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Andrea had a panic assault.

Andrea, 32, who’s being recognized with a pseudonym as a result of she fears for her security, was born in Argentina and moved to the U.S. when she was 3 years previous. She has lived within the U.S. basically her total life, and is presently a Inexperienced Card holder with everlasting resident standing.

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When ICE arrived on the county jail, all Andrea might take into consideration was her three children: her 8-year-old, 2-year-old and her 3-month-old who she was breastfeeding on the time. I must be with my children, she stored pondering.

ICE shackled Andrea’s wrists, ankles and waist, and loaded her onto a bus with a bunch of different immigrants headed to Krome Detention Middle ― a males’s detention heart in Miami with an extended historical past of allegations of inhumane circumstances and sexual abuse, in line with Human Rights Watch.

Once they arrived, Andrea stated she and about 30 different ladies had been stored in a small room meant for guests as a result of it was the one technique to separate them from the bigger male inhabitants. She had no mattress, no bathe, no entry to the outside. There have been no home windows within the visitation room, making it not possible to inform what time of day it was. The ladies had been repeatedly denied entry to a bathe as a result of officers stated it was a male-only facility with nowhere for ladies to wash.

Andrea wasn’t given a breast pump, so she needed to expel her breast milk on her personal. The power offered menstrual pads, however provided the room of greater than two dozen ladies with solely 15 pads at a time. There have been cameras instantly above the bogs, which the ladies needed to share with the opposite male detainees. Andrea stated the lads would typically stand on tables or chairs as a way to look into the stalls whereas ladies had been utilizing them. They’d lick their lips and say vulgar issues to the ladies.

“I felt like a sitting duck,” Andrea advised HuffPost. “There was no type of privacy anywhere. You’re not human when you’re in there.”

Round 56,000 folks have been detained in ICE custody on any given day since President Donald Trump took workplace. They’re held within the upwards of 175 amenities throughout the nation that detain immigrants ― a sprawling community of county jails, state and federal prisons, army bases, and devoted immigration detention facilities.

Most of the people who find themselves detained are ladies identical to Andrea. They referred to as the police for assist, however native regulation enforcement turned them over to ICE. They languished for weeks or months in overcrowded detention facilities typically not geared up with gender-appropriate care. They had been pregnant or postpartum and had been supplied little to no prenatal or maternal well being care. They had been ripped away from their kids and households, not realizing once they would see them once more.

The Division of Homeland Safety and ICE didn’t reply to HuffPost’s request for remark for this story.

Within the early days of Trump’s deportation agenda, the nation watched in horror as immigrant males had been shackled and flown to a mega-prison in El Salvador. Their humanity was stripped away as guards shaved their heads and crammed them into jail cells to sleep on overcrowded, steel bunk beds. The administration weaponized these photos, utilizing them as fodder to additional the lie that Trump’s immigration crackdown was to guard Individuals from “criminal illegal aliens.”

However we not often noticed photos of girls being detained or deported. The few that had been circulated included Rümeysa Öztürk being pulled off the streets by officers in broad daylight; a girl clutching her new child in the course of the road as ICE arrested her; a mom sobbing and saying goodbye to her household after she was detained in immigration courtroom.

As of late June, there have been round 22,000 ladies in ICE detention, in line with information from Detention Reviews, a platform that analyzes publicly obtainable information on immigration detention. ICE doesn’t present information on the gender breakdown of individuals in immigration custody, and the company didn’t reply to a number of requests for the knowledge. The truth that nobody appears to know what number of ladies are in detention is trigger for concern and inherently a part of the issue, advocates inform HuffPost.

There are an estimated 56,000 immigrants in detention daily, which means ladies make up about 40% of detained immigrants ― doubtless the biggest inhabitants of girls in detention within the historical past of U.S. immigration enforcement. They have to navigate more and more punitive immigration programs, that are working with much less and fewer oversight due to Trump’s insurance policies.

“If you’re a woman that lives in a precarious situation ― you are afraid of your perpetrator, you are afraid of deportation, you are afraid to be sent to jail, you are afraid to lose your kids ― [it] exacerbates the levels of violence and the levels of impunity that we are seeing in this country,” Elida Caballero Cabrera, a longtime immigrant and ladies’s rights advocate and lawyer with the Ladies’s Equality Middle, advised HuffPost.

“And who are the people that are being affected the most? Immigrants, undocumented immigrants, but especially immigrant women.”

Ladies face distinctive harms in immigration detention, usually experiencing violence that’s exacerbated by various components resembling being ladies of colour, moms, survivors of gender-based violence or the first caregivers of their households. Immigration attorneys and advocates concern ladies will undergo the best penalties from Trump’s mass deportation agenda due to points like rampant sexual abuse and an absence of correct gender segregation that results in worse circumstances for ladies. The variety of pregnant and postpartum ladies in detention has additionally doubtless skyrocketed, advocates advised HuffPost, they usually’re more and more involved about insufficient prenatal care, harmful being pregnant outcomes and childbirth circumstances.

These points are the direct penalties of Trump’s coverage choices to roll again protections for immigrants detained by ICE and Customs and Border Safety. Trump rescinded an immigration memo in Could that was meant to guard susceptible populations, together with limiting the time pregnant and postpartum ladies might be in CBP custody. An identical ICE directive concerning pregnant and postpartum ladies remains to be in place, although advocates suspect it’s not being adopted.

A congressional report revealed after an April go to to 2 Louisiana ICE detention facilities noticed that the Trump administration “has begun detaining larger numbers of pregnant women in facilities ill-equipped to manage their well-being and safety.” There have been 14 pregnant ladies detained at one facility when Senate Judiciary Committee staffers visited, in line with the report. Most of the detainees described poor medical take care of pregnant and newly postpartum ladies.

The Ladies’s Refugee Fee not too long ago traveled to Honduras to talk with deported residents who corroborated that ICE detention just isn’t giving satisfactory care to pregnant ladies, new moms and infants.

There was at the least one being pregnant loss in a detention heart since Trump enacted his mass deportation agenda. Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus had a stillbirth whereas detained by ICE in Nashville, the Nashville Banner reported. Monterroso-Lemus repeatedly had requested medical care when she had ache in her stomach and felt no fetal motion, however ICE brokers reportedly ignored her.

She gave beginning surrounded by federal guards who, she stated, shackled her toes to the hospital mattress. Whereas Monterroso-Lemus was grieving within the hospital, ICE brokers reportedly arrived on the detention heart to attempt to deport her to Guatemala.

DHS and ICE didn’t reply to HuffPost’s request for remark about Monterroso-Lemus’ expertise.

ICE not too long ago declared hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants ineligible for bond hearings, which is able to preserve extra folks — together with undocumented pregnant ladies like Monterroso-Lemus — in detention for longer intervals. This might put extra ladies and their pregnancies at grave danger.

“The health risk that poses and the conditions that exist in detention right now make folks particularly vulnerable to really horrific outcomes,” Zain Lakhani, the migrant rights and justice director on the Ladies’s Refugee Fee, advised HuffPost.

Native regulation enforcement companies can choose into what are often known as 287(g) agreements with ICE, which empower native authorities to establish and detain immigrants on behalf of the federal company. As of final month, over 730 state and native regulation enforcement companies in 40 states have 287(g) agreements with ICE.

This has had an outsize impression on immigrant survivors of home violence, who’re reportedly not calling the police, going to the hospital after being assaulted or renewing restraining orders in opposition to their abusers. The specter of detention or deportation by native police working for ICE has left many immigrant victims of home and sexual violence too scared to hunt assist ― fearful they may find yourself like Andrea, detained for months for in search of security from their abuser.

There have additionally been a number of reviews of males impersonating ICE to assault and kidnap immigrant ladies. Immigration officers are sometimes seen totally masked and carrying plain garments ― making it more and more arduous to establish who’s finishing up arrests. “ICE’s tactics of plain clothes arrest, family separations and intimidation just blur the lines between state and vigilante violence, and put immigrant communities ― but especially women ― in grave danger,” stated Caballero Cabrera, from Ladies’s Equality Middle.

In March, Trump shut down the federal government companies that when monitored detention amenities for human rights abuses, which means severe points resembling sexual violence, exploitation and medical neglect are very prone to go unchecked. The watchdog companies ― typically the solely recourse for immigrants subjected to inhumane circumstances ― had been “bureaucratic hurdles” that had been “roadblocks to [immigration] enforcement,” a DHS spokesperson stated on the time.

“This is an intentional action by the administration and not an unintended consequence to mass detention,” the Democratic Ladies’s Caucus wrote in a July letter demanding an investigation into ICE’s and CBP’s alleged abuse of girls. “Your disregard for women’s health and safety is not just a one time instance, the abuse and neglect are part of a larger, systemic failure to treat women with dignity, compassion, and basic medical care.”

A latest WIRED investigation of 911 calls from the ten largest immigration detention facilities within the nation discovered that at the least 60% of the amenities reported severe being pregnant problems, sexual assault allegations or suicide makes an attempt.

Regardless of all this, the GOP’s new tax invoice simply handed immigration officers $165 billion, together with $45 billion for brand new detention amenities and $30 billion to rent extra ICE brokers.

“They’re creating this black box of impunity, where they’re keeping women who are pregnant or who have advanced health needs,” Lakhani stated. “There’s no one watching for human rights abuses.”

Many ladies have been detained in amenities not geared up to deal with the precise wants of girls. Earlier than Trump took workplace, there have been solely a handful of immigration amenities that will settle for ladies, however that quantity has exploded since ICE started working beneath a mandate to detain 3,000 immigrants a day.

An increasing number of ladies are actually being despatched to all-male or previously all-male amenities the place overcrowding has made circumstances horrible for ladies. The variety of detainees at Krome, the place Andrea was held, has elevated by 249% since Trump’s inauguration, in line with Human Rights Watch.

Beatriz, an immigrant from Mexico who’s utilizing a pseudonym as a result of she’s dealing with deportation, noticed the results of overcrowding firsthand whereas ending a jail sentence at a federal jail in Miami. FDC Miami, which homes each women and men, began detaining immigrants for ICE whereas Beatriz was there. When Beatriz first arrived in April 2024, a number of flooring housed male inmates and one flooring housed feminine inmates. Within the spring of 2025, as extra immigrants had been detained in FDC Miami, the power moved extra males to her flooring.

She stated FDC Miami cut up the ladies’s flooring in half to make extra room for male ICE detainees, limiting feminine inmates’ motion and entry to recreation rooms.

Beatriz stated the jail guards had been overworked from the inflow of ICE detainees. “A lot of the officers stopped working… because they were tired and working more than the hours they were supposed to work,” she advised her legal professional in a name from ICE detention, in response to HuffPost’s questions on her expertise. “Officers started acting bad with us… because they were tired. Sometimes they used to be in their office sleeping when we needed something.”

The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) declined to touch upon the precise circumstances Beatriz described at FDC Miami, however advised HuffPost that humane therapy of individuals in BOP custody is a prime precedence.

“It is the mission of the Federal Bureau of Prisons to operate facilities that are safe, secure and humane,” BOP spokesperson Emery Nelson advised HuffPost. “We take seriously our duty to protect the individuals entrusted in our custody, as well as maintaining the safety of our employees and the community.”

When Beatriz completed her sentence in June, ICE picked her up and introduced her to the identical Orlando county jail the place Andrea was initially held. She was later moved to a different county jail that rents beds to ICE. She remains to be there, dealing with potential deportation.

Much like excessive charges of sexual violence within the U.S. jail system, an absence of oversight and deeply disproportionate energy dynamics between detainees and guards usually results in exponentially excessive charges of sexual assault and rape.

“Sexual abuse is part of the systemic abuse of the immigration detention system,” Stacy Suh, this system director at Detention Watch Community, a nationwide group working to finish immigration detention within the U.S., advised HuffPost.

Sexual abuse and systemic reproductive coercion has usually gone hand-in-hand with the U.S. immigration enforcement machine. In 2020, throughout Trump’s first administration, immigrant ladies on the Irwin Detention Middle in Georgia had been subjected to extreme and invasive gynecological procedures, together with pointless hysterectomies. The reviews had been later corroborated by a Senate investigation. The non-consensual hysterectomies carried out on immigrant ladies 5 years in the past are akin to the U.S. government-backed pressured sterilization of Puerto Rican ladies within the Nineteen Thirties, ’40s and ’50s.

“It’s no surprise that when you have an entire system that is designed to dehumanize and punish people that sexual violence would be rampant in a situation where no one has any privacy,” Suh stated.

Beatriz, now 49, fled Mexico when she was 15 years previous to flee years of sexual and bodily violence. As an grownup, she was convicted of a drug offense and incarcerated for over a decade at a federal jail in Northern California referred to as FCI Dublin. There she says she was repeatedly sexually abused by Darrell Wayne Smith, one of many jail guards who allegedly used her and different inmates’ immigration statuses in opposition to them. He allegedly threatened to alert ICE about inmates’ immigration standing or promised to assist with citizenship in the event that they did sexual favors for him.

Beatriz’s legal professional, Susan Beaty, advised HuffPost Beatriz was interviewed by the U.S. legal professional’s workplace, the FBI and the Division of Justice about her sexual abuse allegations in opposition to Smith. Beaty, a senior legal professional with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice who has labored with FCI Dublin victims for years, stated Beatriz’s story is considered one of a whole bunch of inmate allegations of sexual abuse at FCI Dublin.

Sexual abuse perpetrated by jail workers at FCI Dublin was so commonplace that inmates and guards dubbed it “The Rape Club.” In a class motion lawsuit filed by former FCI Dublin inmates, ladies described rampant sexual abuse and exploitation on the facility, together with alleged situations the place jail workers used immigration standing to take advantage of and abuse inmates.

“The federal criminal investigation has made clear that FCI Dublin staff explicitly target immigrant women for abuse, leveraging the threat of deportation,” in line with the go well with, which the U.S. authorities later paid out a $116 million settlement to greater than 100 survivors. “In relevant instances, officers told survivors that they ‘looked in their files’ and knew that they were subject to immigration detainers, or they threatened to notify immigration authorities if survivors reported their abuse.”

FCI Dublin ultimately shut down in April 2024 after the director on the time stated she was unable to repair the jail’s points, which included the tradition of sexual abuse. Ten jail guards, together with the warden and chaplain, had been charged with sexually abusing inmates; the bulk have been convicted or pleaded responsible.

Smith, who maintains his innocence, was charged with 15 counts of sexual abuse of 5 inmates ― essentially the most counts of the 9 different jail guards, in line with courtroom paperwork. Smith is accused of masturbating whereas watching ladies bathe, forcing inmates to carry out intercourse acts on each other and himself, and withholding mail if ladies didn’t present their breasts to him or do sexual favors, courtroom paperwork present.

His first trial resulted in a mistrial in April; his new trial is scheduled for September. Beatriz didn’t testify in Smith’s first trial and has not been subpoenaed to testify at his second one.

“He was like, ‘You think that you’re special? You think that you’re different? There’s no difference. I can go over there [Mexico] and I can find you,’” Beatriz recalled Smith telling her. “Not even when you’re gonna get deported, when you go to Mexico, you cannot even be safe.”

Regardless of Beatriz working with federal investigators to place the FCI Dublin abusers behind bars, ICE detained her instantly after she was launched from jail, and she or he now faces deportation.

Lower than a 12 months and a half after FCI Dublin shut down as a consequence of jail workers utilizing ladies’s immigration standing to focus on them for sexual abuse, the Los Angeles Occasions reported in February that the Trump administration was seeking to reopen FCI Dublin as an ICE detention heart. The Bureau of Prisons advised HuffPost there have been no plans to reopen FCI Dublin, and ICE didn’t reply to a number of requests for remark.

Immigration advocates and FCI Dublin victims are nonetheless deeply involved that the concept isn’t useless, with ongoing protests outdoors of the closed federal facility. Some identified that ICE is aggressively wanting for mattress house in Northern California for the reason that company presently has zero detention amenities within the space.

“The story of abuse at FCI Dublin is also very much a story of abuse of immigrant women,” Beaty, who has represented a whole bunch of FCI Dublin victims, advised HuffPost. “The prison has become a symbol of prison staff sexual abuse, and to put anyone back in that facility would be deeply inhumane.”

Beatriz qualifies for a U visa, a part of federal protections to make sure undocumented immigrant survivors who report crimes are offered a path to citizenship. The U.S. authorities declined to certify Beatriz’s U visa, regardless of working with officers within the federal investigation into sexual abuse at FCI Dublin. She’s nonetheless pursuing different asylum paths. If she goes again to Mexico, she’s terrified she’s going to face the identical sort of sexual and bodily violence that pressured her to flee when she was 15.

“Dozens of immigrant women [from FCI Dublin] have reported abuse to federal authorities and then just been discarded and deported,” Beaty stated.

Ladies who to migrate to the U.S. are 5 occasions extra prone to be in search of asylum from gender-based violence like home violence and intercourse trafficking.

In a main determination this month, the Division of Justice denied asylum to a lady from El Salvador who was a sufferer of gang violence. The ruling indicators that future asylum instances based mostly on gender, like home and sexual violence, will probably be more durable to win ― rolling again many years of labor acknowledging ladies’s rights as human rights.

In the course of the first Trump administration, the DOJ dominated in opposition to an asylum seeker named Anabel on comparable grounds. The 2018 determination was ultimately overturned, and Anabel acquired asylum.

“I have felt very glad that my case has been able to help other women escaping similar situations of violence,” Anabel stated throughout a press name with reporters this month. “But now I am hearing that this government is trying to do the same thing to another woman, putting her life in danger, and using her case to close the door to other women.”

“When they tell people they have to return to the country they have fled, where there is so much violence, many are sent back to die.”

Andrea was launched from ICE custody 2 1/2 months after she was detained. She spent her first week at Krome, the lads’s facility, then was transferred to a detention heart in Houston, Texas, the place she stayed till April. Immigration officers cited a decade-old hashish conviction as the rationale they detained her, nevertheless it was ultimately resolved since her case had been expunged.

By the point Andrea arrived residence, her child had began crawling and sitting up on her personal. She was devastated she had missed such huge milestones. Andrea’s boyfriend watched the children whereas she was gone, as did her mom and several other different members of the family who had stayed in Florida for almost three months to assist out.

She’s pleased to be residence, however issues merely aren’t the identical. “I wake up from nightmares crying. The smallest things make me cry now,” she stated. “I’m anxious all the time. I can’t eat. I feel really lost after everything.”

Her children are struggling, too. All three appear to be glued to her facet each waking second, fearful she’s going to vanish once more. Her 2-year-old has a meltdown each time she makes use of the lavatory. Her oldest son will get nervous when she leaves the home.

“I did my whole life here. I grew up here. I have more American in me than I do Argentina,” Andrea stated. “America is a country I devoted my whole life to and it turned its back on me.”

Need assistance? Go to RAINN’s Nationwide Sexual Assault On-line Hotline or the Nationwide Sexual Violence Useful resource Middle’s web site.