Three transgender women being detained at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana allege that they are experiencing abuse and transphobia at the facility. Credit: *(Illustration by Bethany Atkinson/Deep South Today)
Three transgender women who have been detained for months at a male-only central Louisiana immigration detention center allege that they have faced abuse and transphobia at the hands of staff and other detainees.
In interviews with Verite News, they allege that they have been assaulted by officers, forcibly detransitioned, verbally harassed and kept in solitary confinement.
“Everywhere they call us men, faggots, very offensive words,” Camila Toro de Paula, one of the detainees, told Verite News. The officers “let it happen. We don’t have a right to anything here; we trans women don’t have rights” at the facility, she added.
Two of the women — Estephany Rivas and Sofia — have spent months at Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena. The third, Camila Toro de Paula, has been there for more than a year. The three women are in protective custody, separated from other detainees. Verite is only using Sofia’s middle name because she is worried about the conditions at the detention center continuing or worsening.
The Trump administration forces trans women to be housed with men in detention centers. U.S. Immigration and Enforcement (ICE) houses the women in solitary confinement for their protection, but the women say the isolation has not prevented them from enduring death threats, humiliating pat downs and physical abuse by staff.
The Jena facility is run by GEO Group — a for-profit corporation that is one of the country’s largest private prison operators — which has been criticized for its treatment of detainees. A 2024 report on ICE detention centers in Louisiana by Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, the American Civil Liberties Union and other leading human rights organizations recorded “systemic human rights abuses,” as they called it, at the facilities. At the Jena facility, they reported that there had been detainee deaths, people being shackled for more than 24 hours, contaminated food, filthy cells and bathrooms, physical abuse – such as spraying detainees with pepper spray, sexual harassment and assault, medical abuse and neglect, and the use of solitary confinement as retaliation.
Other organizations, such as Immigration Equality and Southeast Dignity Not Detention, have found similar conditions for detainees at the facility.
“There is nothing in the system that is built to recognize their full humanity as trans people, and now there’s no mechanisms in place to protect them from transphobic violence, from abuse of solitary confinement,” Mich González, a New Orleans-based immigrant rights attorney who has represented trans women in detention, said about the Trump administration ending protections for transgender detainees.
The three women had all been living in the U.S. for several years. Like most immigrant detainees, they do not have active criminal charges against them. Rivas had misdemeanor traffic offenses that were resolved before her detention, according to court records and her attorney Mauricio Sierra. Toro de Paula had one previous conviction for a low-level misdemeanor as well as two felony charges stemming from a 2025 arrest that were dismissed, according to her attorney and a New York Times report.
Media reports and court records also show that Toro de Paula, who is Venezuelan, and Rivas, who is Honduran, were taken by ICE agents in New York and in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, respectively, then taken to Central Louisiana. Sofia was taken by Border Patrol agents in Mississippi and transferred to ICE custody before being sent to Central Louisiana.
They are seeking asylum in the U.S. after facing death threats and attempted rapes in their home countries due to being transgender, and at least one has been persecuted by cartels.
It is not uncommon for people to be detained for months in poor conditions, but as the experience of these detainees, which has been corroborated by legal documents, records from the detention facility, medical records, interviews with the detainees’ attorneys and emails from the attorneys to the facility indicate, LGBTQIA+ immigrants face additional discrimination on the basis of their sexual and gender identity — often the very reason they are seeking asylum in the United States. Transgender women in particular are at a high-risk of gendered and sexual abuse due to being housed in male-only facilities.
Verite News reviewed court documents, emails, medical records and incident reports from their time at the Central Louisiana facility, and spoke with the women and their attorneys.
”What they are doing to us is torture,” Toro de Paula said.
The women say that they’ve faced physical abuse because they have refused to undergo pat downs and strip searches that expose their bodies in front of male guards.
According to a June 25 incident report, a group of guards — which included men and at least one woman — approached Rivas and asked her to stand up and submit to a pat down. It is not clear from the report why they were searching her. The female guard said she touched Rivas’ shoulder. The officer then alleged that Rivas “aggressively turned towards me swinging his arm around.” Rivas turned around, “swung the towel in his hand, striking my neck, and said ‘Don’t fucking touch me,’” according to the officer. The report refers to Rivas using he/him/his pronouns instead of her preferred pronouns.
The guard went on to say that another Correctional Emergency Response Team member at the facility put her in the prone position and handcuffed her.
On June 26, a “Unit Disciplinary Committee Report of Findings and Actions” written by a member of the Unit Disciplinary Committee — tasked with investigating incident reports — detailed Rivas’ account of the incident. Verite News has part of the report and requested the full document from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security which has yet to respond.
According to the report, Rivas “stated his shirt began to rise, that’s when he told the officer ‘Don’t touch me’.” In an interview with the committee, Rivas said that she refused to be searched because there were several men present, and she denied that she ever hit the officer with a towel. Rivas said that “a view of camera footage” would show she never swung a towel.
“They threw me to the ground, and all the men were on top of me. (The female sergeant)( tried to lift up my shirt to search me. And I told her, ‘No, no, don’t touch me —don’t touch me because I don’t want you to lift up my shirt,’” Rivas alleged in an interview with Verite News.
Sofia also alleged she had previously allowed the same female guard to search her, but after Rivas was restrained, the guard pushed her against the wall again, taunted her and pulled her hair.
“After they punished (Rivas), she slammed me against the wall again and searched me once more,” Sofia alleged. “‘No touch you?’ ‘No touch you?’, she’d say to me. She was kind of trying to make me angry to see if I’d do something so she could punish me too. And I told her, ‘It’s okay.’ I told her. And she grabbed my hair and pulled it.”
According to the disciplinary report document, the findings were based on the credibility of the officer, the investigation report and Rivas’ version of the incident. Although only Rivas’s testimony is available in the document, DHS said that “all staff provided the required documentation for the incident” and that a use of force review “was conducted by GEO and ICE Leadership and found to be justified.”
Verite News provided Sarah Decker, a senior staff attorney at the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center Center, with the reports. Decker said that the description of Rivas arrest as her being “assisted to the prone position and handcuffed by another CERT member” was a “sanitized” way to describe a takedown — when officers use force to place someone face-down on the floor.
“We’ve had a number of clients who have been beaten and permanently disabled by takedowns, so we routinely see that they’re not actually following the use of force guidelines; that they’re using an indiscriminate amount of force when they’re taking people down,” Decker said.
ICE’s own National Detention Standards handbook classifies a “take-down” as a “hard technique” and stipulates that “officers should first issue verbal commands” because it carries a high risk of injury.
Decker also pointed out the CERT members, who handcuffed Rivas, typically have high-risk security training and are brought in for takedowns.
Rivas’ attorney Mauricio Sierra, who is challenging her detention and seeking her release through a habeas corpus lawsuit, confirmed her account.
“There was no justifiable reason to … attack my client, to confine my client in that way, ” Sierra said. Sierra added that when he met with her, she was in a yellow-colored jumpsuit, a change from her blue-colored jumpsuit, indicating that the facility was classifying her as a higher level threat to the guards at the detention center. DHS confirmed her uniform color was changed because the charge of “Assault on Staff” is more severe.
Due to the conflicting allegations, Rivas was scheduled to have a hearing with an investigative panel on June 29. She alleges that the hearing never took place and that the video footage of the incident she requested was not handed over, while DHS says that the hearing did take place and she provided a verbal statement using the translator line. It is not clear from the documents available to Verite if there were additional findings as a result of the investigation.
Decker added that, in her experience working on use of force cases at detention centers, it is extremely difficult for detainees to hold officers responsible.
“The accounts of the detained people are the most reliable source of information. The video footage is great, but you often can’t get it, and I think the officers’ accounts are just not accurate,” Decker said. Verite asked for the video but it was not provided at the time of publication.
Beyond the allegations of physical abuse, the detainees said they have suffered emotionally from months of isolation.
At the detention facility in Jena, the women are confined in administrative segregation for their protection because they are transgender. It is the same unit as disciplinary segregation, where people are sent for infractions. Both administrative and disciplinary segregation are types of solitary confinement.
Experts, including the United Nations, say that any type of prolonged solitary confinement amounts to torture, despite its use being widespread in the U.S.
“They say that where they’re keeping us here for our protection, but this isn’t protection, it’s torture,” Sofia said.
Detainees in administrative segregation are supposed to have greater privileges to those who are there for disciplinary reasons, such as getting more time in the yard or being able to use a tablet, but court documents indicate they are still locked up for twenty hours a day.
And the women at the Jena detention center also allege that the few privileges they have are curtailed arbitrarily. According to medical records, Sofia once suffered a mental health crisis due to an officer cutting off time outside her cell.
“Sofia approached the sergeant with the intent to explain how she and other queer detainees felt this was discriminatory,” a psychologist who, in coordination with Humanitarian Outreach for Migrant Emotional Health, provided a mental health evaluation for Sofia’s asylum case. “According to Sofia, the sergeant told her to ‘shut up,’ followed by ‘shut your mouth.’”
“She went to her cell, grabbed a razor, and ‘cut [her]self, just to feel relief,” the report continued.
“Sofia elaborated that the superficial “scratch” relieved her frustration,” the psychologist wrote. “She believes there is a difference between clinical symptoms of depression and her experience of being ‘rightfully stressed for being [detained] so long under unfair conditions.’”
DHS responded that both Central Louisiana facility staff and medical staff deny the incident occurred, despite their own records showing Sofia had been transferred to a mental health hospital for self-harm.
Jeremy Jong, a staff attorney with the immigration advocacy nonprofit Al Otro Lado, told Verite News that detention centers are not equipped to deal with detainees who have complex needs, and often opt to simply place people in solitary confinement.
Additionally, DHS responded that “recreation privileges have never been revoked, and that they are offered recreation daily,” but that the women have at times been moved from the general population yard to the Special Management Unit due to rules infractions.
Despite being in protective custody, the women have faced transphobic abuse and threats from other detainees, they allege. In emails reviewed by Verite News from November and December 2025, Laura Berger, an immigration staff attorney at The Legal Aid society representing Toro de Paula, repeatedly wrote to the Jena facility’s supervisory detention and deportation officer, Christopher Rabe, about a detainee who continually verbally harassed and threatened Toro de Paula.
“One of the other detainees in her unit attempted to assault her and loudly accused her of having AIDS. The detainee threatened to harm my client and said that he had killed people before,” Berger wrote in the email. Although the facility provides a way for detainees to make complaints, Berger says that staff either brushed off Toro de Paula’s complaints or are unable to understand the threats since they were made in Spanish.
When asked for comment, DHS responded that the allegations were “FALSE” and that “no staff at [Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center] witnessed the conduct being described by Toro de Paula’s attorney.” However, emails from Rabe to Berger acknowledge the facility had to separate the other detainee from Toro de Paula.
The agency also said that “staff cannot control what other detainees may verbalize,” but “they are trained to hold detainees accountable for misconduct should it occur with internal disciplinary reports.”
All three women say they are being denied treatment for medical ailments like stomach aches, blood in their urine and skin rashes, and are also denied trans health care.
When asked for comment, DHS responded that detainees “have been sent to see a urologist on multiple occasions and other specialists as part of their care plan.” The agency added that it “is the best healthcare many aliens have received in their entire lives” and that “meals are certified by dieticians.” The women also allege that the food is contaminated, undercooked and inedible.
The facility had at least two deaths that were due to an improper medical response, according to a 2017 investigation by the DHS’ Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
While medical neglect is widespread in detention facilities nationwide, specifically denying trans health care fits into a nationwide trend of forced detransition in detention centers.
At Central Louisiana, Sofia and Rivas say that they are being denied hormone replacement therapy, which they both were taking before they were detained. According to a DHS statement to Verite News, DHS segregates the women by biological sex because of Trump’s 2025 executive order. The order also explicitly states that the Bureau of Prisons and federal funds cannot be “expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”
The women also say that they are also being denied feminine clothes and makeup, both of which would help them feel more comfortable in their bodies.
“They don’t let us wear makeup, so what we do is use a pencil to paint on our faces. Just because we do that, they get mad and report us. What harm are we doing to them by” using pencils to replace makeup, Rivas said.
DHS says the allegations that undergarments have been changed is false. Regarding their use of colored pencils as makeup, DHS says that “detainees are not permitted to utilize colored pencils outside their intended use” because it is considered contraband.
“[Detention] is now encouraged because mistreating people puts them in a more desperate situation, to then seek voluntary departure and under duress give up legal rights they may have to stay in the country”, Nora Ahmed, who is ACLU of Louisiana’s legal director, told Verite News.
The women at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center who are alleging transphobic harassment, physical and emotional abuse aren’t the only ones in Louisiana in recent years.
In 2023, Vicky, a transgender woman who was detained in Pine Prairie ICE Detention Center — also operated by the GEO Group — filed a civil rights complaint describing the culture of the facility. In a press release announcing the filing of the complaint, the group Immigrant Justice said the facility had a “culture of transphobia, harassment and medical negligence.”
In September 2025, the ACLU of Louisiana, Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center and the National Immigration Project filed complaints on behalf of four immigrants who were detained at the South Louisiana ICE Detention Center in Basile — also run by the GEO Group. The complaints alleged that two trans men and one nonbinary person, all housed in a female-only facility, were subject to sexual abuse, forced labor, retaliation and denial of medical care.
And this type of alleged mistreatment is happening in other states as well. A 2016 Human Rights Watch report that included interviews with former trans detainees, found that they were subjected to abusive strip searches in front of male guards, and a peer reviewed study that analyzed ICE audits found that strip searches of transgender detainees occurred in violation of ICE policy from 2014 to 2019 in at least three states: Washington, Arizona and California.
Yet, it is difficult to estimate how many people are affected by transphobic abuse in immigrant detention centers.
Under the second Trump administration, ICE is excluding the number of transgender detainees from constitutionally mandated detention center reports. The last report issued by the Biden administration in January 2025 recorded that there were 47 transgender people in immigration detention. But according to the Vera Institute of Justice, the government is not counting transgender people due to the administration’s hostility towards trans people’s lives and rights.
The 2025 executive order that President Donald Trump signed equated gender with biological sex and mandated federal agencies to remove “all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages” which recognized transgender and gender non-conforming people. The order also prohibited trans women from being housed in women’s prisons or detention centers. In effect, they can only be housed in male facilities.
Shortly after, the 2015 “Transgender Care Memorandum” was taken offline. It was last available in February 2025 from ICE’s website, according to the Internet Archive. The memo — signed by Tom Homan, then the executive director for ICE under the Obama administration — established basic care requirements for transgender detainees. (Homan is now Trump’s “border czar.”) For example, it mandated limiting solitary confinement to 72 hours, to consider placing a detainee in housing consistent with their gender identity, and to conduct strip searches in private, among other rules. Additionally, contracts with some detention facilities had their transgender care requirements removed.
While past complaints indicate that these transgender care requirements were often violated by facilities, the memo still gave trans detainees a degree of recognition, as well as a way to challenge discriminatory treatment.
“We know that the government is making it impossible to even be yourself in prison,” Déa Thatcher, an organizer with Trans & Queer Community Fund, a mutual aid group that provides commissary support for trans immigrant detainees, said. “When I tell you the amount of times I’ve gotten on a video with someone and they have put their hands over their face because they don’t want me to see their beard, it’s like they are being forced to look a certain way and present a certain way.”
According to Rivas’ habeas corpus petition, she is seeking asylum due to being targeted by the Honduran Los Zetas cartel, who she claims murdered her brothers after she refused to traffic drugs for them. She had been harassed by them for years due to being transgender, the petition says. Mexican cartel members later kidnapped and assaulted Rivas on her journey to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“If I go back to my country, I am practically signing my death warrant,” Rivas said.
Sofia and Toro de Paula are also seeking asylum after being subjected to transphobic physical violence in their home countries. They both had their asylum petitions denied and are appealing the decision.
“In general, trans women had a shot at winning [asylum] because of how our asylum laws are written and because trans people are targeted in many countries for being trans,” Jong told Verite News.
But immigration detention makes it harder for their legal team to prepare an asylum case or an appeal because they can only meet with detainees for a few hours each week, making it more difficult to prepare a strong case. It is then much more likely that they will lose their case and be deported.
“You have to collect all this evidence, where your main person to help you is locked up, with little to no access to the outside world, and where everyone outside is grappling with their absence,” immigration attorney Mich González said. He added that immigrants have cases that could determine life or death yet are being tried in an administrative court inside a facility that is actively harming people.
The women could be detained indefinitely. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review a case determining whether immigrants can be denied bond and kept in detention while they challenge their removal. If the court rules in favor of the Trump administration, the women will have no clear path out of immigration detention, barring deportation or being allowed to legally remain in the country.
”We want them to treat us with dignity and to treat the next trans people who come to this center well, with respect,” Rivas said.
This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
