ICE determined to ship a tweet recognizing Delight Month. It did not go effectively (for ICE)

“Do you remember Roxsana Hernández – the trans woman who died in ICE custody after not receiving adequate treatment for her HIV? asked Lambda Legal. “We do.” BuzzFeed news reported in 2019 that officials had been clearly instructed to record surveillance footage from the last days of the Hernández, a 33-year-old transgender asylum seeker who died in agency custody in May 2018. They deleted it anyway, despite federal regulations that state officials must keep such materials in the event of a lawsuit.

Karen Hoffman, a lawyer advocating for asylum-seeking children, tweeted a report from The Guardian highlighting the abuse LGBTQ prisoners are suffering at the moment, particularly in the case of a transgender asylum seeker detained by the agency for two years.

Maura Martinez, an asylum seeker originally from Nicaragua, was beaten by male prisoners under ICE surveillance in 2019. But instead of taking steps to protect her, she and a second trans inmate were thrown into solitary confinement “allegedly for their own safety”. said the report. Hopes that she will be released under the new administration have been dashed. “[T]Some of us who are still in jail have been forgotten, “Martinez said in the report.

“One time, an ICE attorney asked my bisexual asylum seeker who was repeatedly raped, assaulted, and forced to watch her partner being murdered in front of her eyes to ‘prove’ she was bisexual,” tweeted Katrina Bleckley, attorney for Haitian Bridge. “You literally yelled at her in the courtroom while she cried hysterically.”

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Fortunately, she won her asylum case and is now going to school to become a pediatric nurse 🥰

– Katrina Bleckley (@katrinableckley) June 17, 2021

“Reminder: When the pandemic started, ICE refused to release asylum seekers living with HIV,” Lambda Legal continued. “How do we know? Because we fought ICE with @IEquality to get it released. ”More than two dozen House Democrats also called on the former illegally appointed Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to release LGBTQ asylum seekers from ICE custody, and said Chad Wolf said that in the midst of the pandemic, fear “will be heightened for LGBTQ people who are already particularly at risk”. on abuse and mistreatment in immigration detention. “

ICE should be abolished, and critics of that stance love to prop up a dystopian, fake image of a nation running amok should that happen. But ICE has only been around since 2003. Unfortunately, the Biden government’s first official budget does not call for overall funding cuts for both ICE and Customs and Border Protection, another corrupt federal immigration agency that has also benefited from child abuse.

Others on Twitter also noted that the tweet from ICE allegedly celebrating Pride never mentioned anything about LGBTQ prisoners, only LGBTQ employees. My colleague Marissa Higgins has the right idea of ​​this whole social media disaster here:

In a letter posted on the day of the very unfortunate tweet from ICE, a group of non-governmental organizations submitted a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Acting ICE Director Tae Johnson, “demanding that all incarcerated people who are LGBTQ or living with HIV be released from immigration detention facilities immediately.” In a statement, Bridget Crawford, Legal Director at Immigration Equality said that “[t]Throwing LGBTQ and HIV positive asylum seekers into jail is cruel, expensive and dangerous. For transgender and HIV positive people, it can even be fatal.

“In response to years of well-documented abuses against the community, the government has implemented ineffective half-measures that have completely failed,” Crawford continued. “That’s why we demanded that the DHS release all transgender and HIV-positive people immediately. No one should ever be jailed for escaping persecution because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status. Doing so during a pandemic is a human rights atrocity. “